Cypress Semiconductor has announced that version 2.0 of its PSoC Creator graphical design environment for the PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 programmable SoC families is available for free download. The design environment introduces support for the production PSoC 5 ARM architecture and devices as well as enabling the interoperation with the Keil µVision 4 IDE (integrated development environment). It boosts device performance through timing-driven routing enabling clock speeds to increase by as much as 20%, claims the company. It features an enhanced static timing analysis tools.
The design tool allows to customise the PSoC device to system requirements in minutes, says the company. It includes a rich library of tested and characterised analogue and digital components that can be drag-and-dropped into a design and configured to suit a broad array of application requirements, claims the company. 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 parameterised so that the implementation is automatically optimised to fit the needs perfectly with no wasted resources. The build process generates a consistently-named set of APIs for each component.
The design tool also introduces peripherals, including Sony/Philips digital interface 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. It includes more than 80 analogue and digital components in its portfolio.
