PSoC aides Indian designers to become efficient

Rajeev Mehtani, senior vice president, Cypress Semiconductor, India Operations in conversation with Abhigna of CIOL, reveals about how Programmable System-on-Chip (PSoC) could help designers to future-proof their design as well as save costs and get to market quickly.

CIOL: How will the new PSoC help the embedded design industry in India?

Rajeev Mehtani: Cypress has always believed that there is a better way to approach embedded design. We wanted to replace catalogs of competitor products with highly configurable programmable systems on chips. The flexibility of Cypress’s new PSoC Programmable System-on-Chip will enable designers in India to get to market quicker and save on system costs.

The new PSoC 3 and 5 architectures remove barriers that designers in India face with fixed function MCUs. Programmable analog and digital blocks in PSoC give them the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements quickly and easily, while designing products that specifically meet market demands.

CIOL: Can you brief our developer community how PSoC can help designers in India?

RM: PSoC can help designers in India to future-proof their design through the use of an adaptable design framework and maximizing the efficiency of components selected. All this enables them to develop their application at the smallest possible form factor, with the smallest power budget and with even fewer costly components, all on time for project success.

The new PSoC Creator design tool simplifies thinks further by enabling developers in India ‘design the way they think’! It has a revolutionary GUI and uniquely powerful hardware/software co-design environment. It provides a rich library of dozens of pre-configured analog and digital peripherals that can easily be dropped into the schematic design canvas and combined into powerful systems.

CIOL: Please elaborate more on the PSoC3 and 5 architecture?



RM: PSoC is a design methodology and the world’s only programmable embedded system-on-chip. Over the last 6 years, we have witnessed explosive growth with our PSoC 1 architecture and devices with over 9,000 active customers.

We are now introducing PSoC 3 and PSoC 5, scalable architectures to extend the PSoC design methodology to the precision analog, programmable digital and high performance 8- to 32-bit world.

PSoC 3 will enable the high-performance 8-bit world as well as some of the performance demands from the 16-bit application space with its high-performance 8051 and high-precision analog and digital capabilities.

PSoC 5 is targeted towards the higher end of the embedded market by addressing applications requiring mid- to high-end 16-bit-level performance and the 32-bit performance world with the Cortex-M3 processor.

CIOL: What is the role of the PSoC Creator Integrated Development Environment?

RM: With these new architectures, we’re also introducing the design tool that brings the PSoC design methodology to life: the PSoC Creator. It truly enables our customers to take advantage of the capabilities these new architectures provide.

PSoC Creator is a development environment that enables engineers to ‘design the way they think’. It has an easy, user-friendly GUI which supports concurrent hardware and software development.

It comes with schematic-based designs so developers don’t have to worry about how the chip is architected to implement their design. They can simply drag and drop and configure the peripherals that they want PSoC to implement and PSoC Creator takes care of the details to implement them.

PSoC Creator also supports sharing and reusing IP.

CIOL: What are the application areas where these can be used? Do you have any examples to share with our readers?

RM: With the capabilities of PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 we can now address some very complex applications such as a Glucose Meters in the Portable Medical Devices market.

The broad range of markets which PSoC 3 and 5 can address includes: Medical, Automotive, Consumer Electronics (with LCD, CapSense, Low Power/Low Voltage and high performance core operations), Digital Entertainment and Industrial markets.

CIOL: Is the PSoC using open source development tools? Please elaborate, if yes. If not, how can open source embedded designers make use?

RM: We recognize the demand and usefulness of enabling customers to openly share and trade IP we all develop. We are enabling this through the development of Internet communities and marketplaces. We will announce more of these details later in Q4.

CIOL: How do you see Indian software developer community/embedded designers in the field of embedded design industry?

RM: The embedded design community in India totals more than 80,000 developers. The work is being carried out in a large number of areas including, AV, cellular, networking, industrial etc. While the Indian service and MNC R&D community has been able to absorb a lot of the work which has comes its way, it needs to focus more on IP creation and leadership in the areas mentioned above. This will foster more startups and put the Indian embedded community firmly on the world map. A good example of a successful country in this space is Israel where a lot of IP creation and product creation happens.