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Technical Brief PSoC
Technical Brief PSoC
It is not very often that we get REALLY excited about a new technology, there are always new processors or communication chipsets which interest us and catch our attention but the new Cypress PSoC (Programmable System-on-Chip) not only grabbed our attention, it changed our very process of designing new products. Now, instead of selecting the most appropriate processor from a list where each device is only slightly different, the processor required is selected based on the number of required peripherals in both the digital and the analogue domain. With almost a hundred different options for peripheral presets, which are all changeable in real time whilst the system is running, we can now create a more versatile embedded environment.
The PSoC peripherals contain the control electronics for other Cypress products, such as the CyFi wireless system, which makes the integration of 2.4GHz wireless communications available to almost any project whilst still managing to reduce the overall component count over the entire design.
With a dynamic chip a new era of product design is entered, a chip that performs perfectly well as an SPI controller can, with a simple command, change the communication input to decode DMX512. So a control system can be created that can facilitate the input of either protocol on the same input channels on the chip. This has never been possible before and is only made available by the unique analogue and digital pin MUX found solely inside the PSoC.
The largest of these devices, the CY8C29x66, offers up to 12 8-bit analogue blocks and 16 digital blocks and also contains the control systems for I2C, SPI and UART peripherals, whilst still providing the user with 32kB of flash memory and 2kB of RAM. This device also offers up to 64 general purpose pins to which these peripherals can be assigned.
Jon Reece, Engineer, MLE
