Cypress Semiconductor announced that Version 2.0 of its PSoC Creator Design Environment for the PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 programmable system-on-chip families is available for free download for all users. Among the hundreds of feature enhancements, PSoC Creator 2.0 introduces support for the production PSoC 5 ARM architecture and devices as well as enabling customers to interoperate with the popular and powerful Keil µVision 4 IDE. This interoperability enables customers to rapidly draw, configure and design custom device hardware in PSoC Creator and then write the application code in the familiar and feature-rich µVision 4 IDE. The new version boosts device performance through new, timing-driven routing enabling clock speeds to increase by as much as 20 percent. Enhanced static timing analysis tools utilized during the hardware customization process guarantee performance across temperature variations and simplify design and debug.
PSoC Creator graphical design tool allows users to customize the PSoC device to their unique system requirements in minutes. The design environment includes a rich library of fully tested and characterized analog and digital components that can be drag-and-dropped into a design and configured to suit a broad array of application requirements. The tool automatically places components into the PSoC device, routes all on-chip signals and directs I/O to the optimum pins. Each peripheral component is carefully parameterized so that the implementation is automatically optimized to fit the developer’s needs perfectly with no wasted resources. The build process generates a consistently-named set of APIs for each component that allows the software developer to control the hardware without knowing the underlying register set. Customized designs, and their associated APIs, can even be saved in a library for future reuse and easily shared within an organization. The latest version of PSoC Creator introduces new peripherals, including S/PDIF for digital audio, Serial GPIO for hard disk drive controllers, an advanced and hardware-based fan controller, a voltage power sequencer, and an external memory interface to simplify hardware configuration. PSoC Creator now includes more than 80 analog and digital components in its portfolio.
