Billed as 'The World's first Embedded Power Controller' the PowerPSoC is the first family of devices to combine the power of an embedded controller with integrated high-power peripherals.

For the past 6 years Cypress has been capturing marketing share with its innovative PSoC device that incorporates digital & analogue components normally found on the surrounding PCB, as peripherals inside the micro - thereby saving on required board space, components & importantly cost. The PowerPSoC builds on this with the addition of on-board high-power peripheral functionality.

The devices include four internal 32V 1A rated low-side n-channel MOSFETs, four 32V 6MHz rated current sense amplifiers with adjustable gain settings, four 2MHz hysteretic controllers that can configured as either buck, boost, or buck-boost & a 32V input voltage regulator.

The M8C CPU core is a powerful processor with speeds up to 24 MHz, providing a four MIPS 8-bit Harvard architecture MPU. With its configurable system-on-chip architecture for embedded control design, offering a flash-based equivalent of a field-programmable ASIC without lead-time or NRE penalties the PSoC devices includes: Up to 16 Kbytes of Flash memory, 1 Kbytes of SRAM, a host of timers, an 8x8 multiplier with 32-bit accumulator, power & sleep monitoring circuits, & hardware I2C communications. Indeed Cypress claims that a single PSoC can integrate as many as 100 peripheral functions.

With full support in PSoC Designer 5.0, Cypress's software development tool for the PSoC range, engineers are quickly able to develop & customise their application for the PowerPSoC device. PSoC Designer 5.0 incorporates the drag-&-drop embedded system development of PSoC Express 3.0 & the more traditional IDE of PSoC Designer 4.4 to offer 3 options for PowerPSoC application development. Either System-level view can be used (drag-&drop), Chip-level view (traditional IDE with access to code) or a hybrid of the two, where the developer can start by quickly establishing an application framework in system-view & then dive into the code & detail by switching to chip-level view.

Initially aimed at the LED lighting sector where product design requires the understanding of complex calculations to cope with different LED performance specifications & degradation factors (such as output flux, wavelength etc) over different temperatures; Cypress offers temperature or optical feedback algorithms that are automatically applied to the selected design & programmed into a Cypress controller when using the PowerPSoC device & PSoC Designer 5.0 to save developers development time & complexity.

But by no means is this product limited to lighting end use, indeed the PowerPSoC family expands into other embedded applications such as white goods & industrial control where power controller is a primary design consideration.

Looking to develop end systems with fewer components, faster design cycles, lower power consumption & higher reliability - then the PowerPSoC family must be on your review list.

Useful links
Cypress Semiconductor [www.cypress.com]