New Industry Products

PSoCs target Digital Power, Motion Control and Power Metering

February 26, 2015 by Jeff Shepard

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. today introduced a new, low-cost prototyping kit that gives engineers unprecedented access to design with the powerful 32-bit ARM® Cortex®-M3 core in Cypress's PSoC® 5LP programmable system-on-chip architecture. The $10 CY8CKIT-059 Prototyping Kit delivers PSoC 5LP's ability to reduce systems costs by integrating analog front-ends, digital logic and user interface ICs with the architecture's programmable analog and programmable digital blocks. PSoC 5LP also simplifies power architecture design by supporting the industry's widest operating voltage range of 0.5V to 5.5V. The kit, combined with Cypress's free, easy-to-use PSoC Creator™ Integrated Design Environment (IDE) and hundreds of available example projects, enables rapid prototyping of designs and accelerates time-to-market.

The PSoC 5LP architecture provides unmatched processing performance with a 24-bit digital filter coprocessor and 24 Universal Digital Blocks -- Cypress's programmable digital blocks containing two programmable logic devices and a programmable data path with status and control registers. A high-performance direct memory access (DMA) controller enables smart peripherals to operate in parallel to the ARM Cortex-M3 core, saving cycles and increasing throughput. PSoC 5LP one-chip solutions are ideal for a wide range of applications, including motor control, digital power management, switch mode power supplies, solar inverters and metering.

"PSoC 5LP delivers unmatched 32-bit performance with Cypress's unique digital coprocessors, such as the Digital Filter Block, for signal processing to create high-order, 128-tap filters with no impact to the main processor in a one-chip ARM solution," said John Weil, vice president of PSoC marketing at Cypress. "Our new $10 prototyping kit gives designers the ability to quickly create signal-processor prototypes that leverage the PSoC 5LP architecture's high level of integration between analog and digital blocks, as well as its processing power."

Cypress is demonstrating the new PSoC 5LP Prototyping Kit at the Embedded World 2015 exhibition in booth number 259, located in Hall 5, at the Nuremberg Messe. Cypress is also demonstrating its PSoC 4 M-Series, Bluetooth Low Energy, USB Type-C, 4-PLL clock generator, automotive and memory solutions at the show.

The 4.3-inch by 0.9-inch CY8CKIT-059 Prototyping Kit provides access to all 48 I/Os on the 68-QFN PSoC 5LP device. An additional PSoC 5LP device is provided as a full-featured programmer and debugger with a unique snap-away design. PSoC 5LP also simplifies designs with flexible routing of any analog or digital signal to any GPIO. The PSoC Creator IDE complements the kit and silicon with more than 100 pre-verified, production-ready components -- free embedded ICs represented by an icon -- that can be dragged and dropped into designs.

PSoC 5LP includes best-in-class 0.5V startup with integrated boost, 1.71-5.5V fully functional analog, along with an operating range of 0.5-5.5V. These capabilities open up new applications needing single-cell battery performance and high-precision analog to a world beyond fixed function MCUs. The architecture includes devices with up to 80-MHz clock speeds. Additionally, all PSoC 5LP devices offer Cypress's industry-leading CapSense® capacitive touch-sensing technology for fast implementation of sleek, reliable touch-sensing user interfaces. Designers can add CapSense touch-sensing to the CY8CKIT-059 Prototyping Kit without any external components by simply adding a header to the I/Os. PSoC 5LP devices are shipping today. The PSoC 5LP Prototyping Kit will be available early in the second quarter of 2015.