Cypress PSOC Analogue/digital chip array/ mpu

[anthony wooldridge]

Can anyone recommend these devices, they look great on paper.
I did a search on this newsgroup but could not find hardly a reference to
them.
They seem to be virtually unobtanium in UK anyway.
RS have discontinued stocking due to no (not low) sales.
Are they an up and coming device or on the way out of fashion?
Regards
Anthony

 

[PeteS]

These things have been around for years. They have a very niche market
(and I have used them).

For the market they meet, they are great, but they are very limited (I
kept running into limits in the amount of logic they could handle).

If you need something fairly simple (logic wise) that can handle
analogue, then they are great. I would not receommend them if you need
more than 15 simple logic steps.

Cheers

PeteS

 

[anthony wooldridge]

These things have been around for years. They have a very niche market
(and I have used them).

For the market they meet, they are great, but they are very limited (I
kept running into limits in the amount of logic they could handle).

I can see that could happen,
one example I saw needed to use one digital block out of only eight
available on that device just to make an invertor gate.

If you need something fairly simple (logic wise) that can handle
analogue, then they are great.

What about the analogue capability,
It looks good, up to14 bit ADC's, switched capacitor filters using no
external components etc etc,
but I heard that the rail-rail op amps were not quite as good as they could
be for accurate work,
showing non linearity of offset with common mode input

Regards
Anthony

 

[PeteS]

The analogue parts of the devices are good, but not excellent. If you
aren't looking for audiophile quality, they are really good.

One of my applications was fairly static - I used it as a combined
analogue system monitor, controller and sequencer. I only needed to be
within about 5% on the analogue side, so any non-linearities were of
little concern (because they are far less than that at the range I used
them).

How they would perform beyond that I have no personal experience of,
although I did look closely at the spec (at the time) to make sure it
would not impact what I was doing.

The most I can say is the spec looked accurate.

Cheers

PeteS

 

[Robert Lacoste]

Can anyone recommend these devices, they look great on paper.
I did a search on this newsgroup but could not find hardly a reference to
them.
They seem to be virtually unobtanium in UK anyway.
RS have discontinued stocking due to no (not low) sales.
Are they an up and coming device or on the way out of fashion?
Regards
Anthony

Dear Anthony,

I have used these PSoC devices in may be 5-6 projects, some already in
production, and it was always with great pleasure and success. In particular
the PSoCDesigner tool is very friendly and powerful. I even used them for a
"fully analog" project, ie without using the onchip CPU for anything else
than initializing the analog sections.

Pros :
- great concept, great way to add some analog (filters and amplifiers in
particular) or digital blocs to a design without any other chip
- low cost (as compared with switched-capacitor chips for example)
- dynamic reconfiguration
- great IDE
- low power consumption (in particular good sleep mode)

Cons :
- good but not top-of-the-art analog blocks (quite high offset & noise,
don't use them for µV signals, in some designs an external preamplifier
could be required)
- few RAM bytes
- don't replace an FPGA...

They are easily availble from Digikey or Farnell, or even from Cypres's
online store

Friendly yours,

 

[anthony wooldridge]

Dear Anthony,

I have used these PSoC devices in may be 5-6 projects, some already in
production, and it was always with great pleasure and success. In
particular the PSoCDesigner tool is very friendly and powerful. I even
used them for a "fully analog" project, ie without using the onchip CPU
for anything else than initializing the analog sections.

Pros :
- great concept, great way to add some analog (filters and amplifiers in
particular) or digital blocs to a design without any other chip
- low cost (as compared with switched-capacitor chips for example)
- dynamic reconfiguration
- great IDE
- low power consumption (in particular good sleep mode)

Cons :
- good but not top-of-the-art analog blocks (quite high offset & noise,
don't use them for µV signals, in some designs an external preamplifier
could be required)
- few RAM bytes
- don't replace an FPGA...

OK thanks, you've convinced me, they look good enough to evaluate.
The learning curve looks quite steep though.

They are easily availble from Digikey or Farnell, or even from Cypres's
online store

Thanks for that info
I tried Farnell UK but no joy.
Digikey list most of the family but are mainly zero stock or special order
only 1000 min quantity,
but they do have some 8pin cy8c27143 devices in stock. This should give me a
taster!
they also have some cy8c29466 28pin SOIC

The cy8c29xxx series look quite good with 32K flash 2k Sram and double the
number of digital blocks.

Regards
Anthony