Cypress Korea (Country Manager Young-do Lim, www.cypress.com ) announced extended capabilities for its excellent PSoC Creator™ Integrated Design Environment (IDE) for its PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 programmable system-on-chip product families.

This update, known as the “Component Pack,” includes new features for power monitoring and fan control. Customers can easily “drag and drop” these features onto existing PSoC devices to implement the new capabilities within their designs.

Components are “virtual” chips represented by a single icon in Cypress’s PSoC Creator software, which are brought into the design. Each component is fully tested and characterized to accelerate time-to-market for customers. Cypress releases component packs that upgrade existing components, as well as providing new components approximately every eight weeks. Component packs upgrade existing PSoC Creator installations while maintaining the core functionality of the design environment without alteration.

Component Pack 3 adds a new Power Monitor Component feature that simplifies voltage and current measurements on power rails. Up to 32 DC power rails can be monitored using the PSoC 3 device with 0.5% accuracy. The Power Monitor Component simplifies the complex configuration of ADC, clock frequency, resolution, and range by extracting basic analog front-end and firmware code through a simple graphical user interface (GUI). System designers can input voltage and current ranges with this GUI and click the “build” button to start power rail measurements on the PSoC Power Management Expansion Board Kit (CY8CKIT-035) within minutes.

The new fan controller component provides the ability to independently control up to 16 industry-standard 3-wire and 4-wire brushless DC fans through a simple GUI tool. This fan controller component generates a Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) output for fan speed control and accepts variable frequency tachometer input from the fan to enable measurement of fan rotational speed. The component also comes with advanced fan control algorithms that regulate fan speeds to reduce fan noise and change airflow and fan load, which can be prototyped and developed using the PSoC Thermal Management Expansion Board Kit (CY8CKIT-036).
These new components enable highly stable hardware-based solutions for the communications, server, and storage markets, where reliability is absolutely critical. Detailed datasheets and videos for each of these components are available on the Cypress website. For more information regarding the fan control component, please refer to http://www.cypress.com/go/comp_FanController , and for more information regarding the power monitor component, please refer to http://www.cypress.com/go/comp_PowerMonitor .

Detailed information on the two kits for prototyping, evaluating, and developing these power and thermal management solutions can be found on the Cypress website at http://www.cypress.com/go/CY8CKIT-035 or http://www.cypress.com/go/CY8CKIT-036 .

“With the easy-to-use graphical interface in PSoC Creator, customers can quickly customize power monitoring and thermal management designs to meet their unique system requirements all in one integrated device,” said Lim Young-do, General Manager of Cypress Korea.

Release Status
Free downloads of Component Pack 3 for existing PSoC Creator 2.0 users are available on the website ( www.cypress.com/go/psoccreator ). Users who download PSoC Creator 2.0 for the first time will automatically receive component packs. Additionally, when new component packs are released, registered users will receive the relevant information.

Cypress PSoC Creator
PSoC Creator is an exceptional graphical design tool that enables users to customize PSoC devices to their specific system requirements in a short amount of time. This design environment includes a rich library of fully tested and characteristic analog and digital components that can be dragged and dropped onto designs and configured to meet a wide array of application requirements. The tool automatically places components onto PSoC devices, routes all on-chip signals, and points I/O to optimal pins. Each peripheral component is meticulously parameterized and automatically optimized to perfectly meet the developer's needs without wasting resources. The build process generates a continuously named set of APIs for each component, allowing software developers to control the hardware without knowing the underlying register set. Customized designs and associated APIs can be saved to a library for future reuse and easily shared within the organization. With PSoC Creator, customers can design according to application requirements rather than the limitations of the target device. Resetting the target to a new device is as simple as rebuilding the application. Therefore, design porting between PSoC devices, including the complete migration of the design being worked on from 8-bit to 32-bit devices, is as simple as taking a snapshot.

Cypress PSoC capable of responding to design changes
PSoC devices adopt a highly combinable system-on-chip architecture for embedded control designs, providing capabilities equivalent to flash-based field-programmable ASICs without lead-time or NRE penalties. PSoC devices integrate combinable analog and digital circuits controlled by on-chip microcontrollers, enabling enhanced design changeability and reduced component count. A single PSoC device can integrate over 100 peripheral functions while reducing customer design time, board space, and power consumption, while improving system quality and lowering system costs. Flexible PSoC resources enable designers to make firmware-based changes throughout the design, verification, production, and post-launch phases, ensuring products remain future-proof. The inherent flexibility of PSoCs shortens design cycle times and enables future feature enhancements. All PSoC devices are also dynamically reconfigurable, allowing designers to modify internal resources while utilizing fewer components to perform a given task. For more detailed information regarding PSoC products, please refer to the website www.cypress.com/psoc . Additionally, for information regarding free online training, please refer to www.cypress.com/psoctraining .