Cypress Korea (Country Manager Young-do Lim, www.cypress.com ) announced a fan control solution based on its PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 programmable system-on-chip product families.

This new solution is available for free through PSoC Creator™ 2.0, Cypress’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 devices. Additionally, the new fan control solution enables highly reliable hardware-based fan control for reliability-critical communications, server, and storage markets. The combination of the PSoC Programmable Digital Fabric and graphical configuration tools allows customers to rapidly customize complete fan control solutions with just a few lines of firmware code. For more information, please visit www.cypress.com/go/potm .

Cypress's fan control solution is currently available for the manufacturing of PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 devices. This solution is easily implemented within the PSoC Creator 2.0 IDE, which provides fan control components along with a graphical user interface that eliminates design complexity. Customers simply input electronic parameters found in fan datasheets into the graphical interface, and the toolset handles the details. In addition, the PSoC fan control solution provides hardware-based fan control and speed regulation functions embedded on top of the programmable digital architecture within the PSoC device.

Furthermore, firmware-based solutions are difficult to design due to the complexity of combining firmware fan control algorithms with I2C communication firmware. PSoC's proprietary hardware-based approach can simply avoid these problems. This complex combination is further intensified in fan tray designs where 4 to 12 fans are common and independent control of each fan is required.

The new fan control solution can be utilized as a drop-in “component” in Cypress’s PSoC Creator™ 2.0 design software. A component is a “virtual chip” displayed as a single icon in Cypress’s PSoC Creator software. These virtual chips are “drag and drop” as component icons into the PSoC Creator design, integrating system interfaces and discrete ICs into the PSoC design. To minimize time-to-market, Cypress offers the PSoC Thermal Management Expansion Board Kit (CY8CKIT-036), which was specially developed for the rapid development and prototyping of PSoC-based fan control systems.

New fan control solutions are gaining attention as this month's PSoC Peripheral, a program developed to highlight applications and capabilities that PSoCs can deliver but current standard MCUs cannot. Each peripheral will be displayed at www.cypress.com/go/potm , accompanied by design support documentation. On this page, customers can download the PSoC Creator software for free and immediately begin developing high-performance fan control applications.

“Fan control is where PSoC demonstrates its capabilities through other solutions. The graphical user interface provides PSoC customers with a flexible solution that is easy to implement,” said Lim Young-do, General Manager of Cypress Korea.