Cypress Pitches Programmable System on a Chip

Cypress Microsystems just unveiled its PSoC (Programmable System on Chip) microcontroller family. The company says these widgets can replace traditional microcontrollers along with many of the other components found in 8-bit designs. Cypress even goes as far as to say that each member of the chip family can replace hundreds of traditional, fixed-peripheral controllers. The new set of chips, called the CY8C25x/26x, lets users select peripheral types and quantities, how they interconnect, and how they pin-out to the circuit board. By changing register settings, the microcontroller can change its configuration to support the changing state of an application. As and example, Cypress says that in a two-way communication device, the PSoC microcontroller can configure the peripheral capabilities to serve as a "receiver" MCU. When the user presses the "talk" button, the MCU will reconfigure the peripherals to create a "transmitter" MCU. Release the button, and it becomes a "receiver" again. The PSoC microcontroller family integrates an 8-bit microcontroller, 8K to 32K flash memory, SRAM, and programmable arrays of analog and digital system functions. Cypress also offers a set of development tools to support the PSoC Microcontroller. The tools include a C compiler and assembler, a linker, a debugger, a "device editor," and an in-circuit emulator. The device editor lets you configure a PSoC device by dragging and dropping peripherals or functions from a library of user modules. The selected user modules are then mapped onto the available PSoC blocks. The PSoC CY8C25x/26x microcontroller family consists of 15 products. They feature 512 Bytes of configuration and I/O control registers, 128 or 256 Bytes of SRAM, and 4K, 8K, or 16K Bytes of flash program space. Operating voltages range from 5.0V +/- 10% and 3.3V +/- 10%.