Re: Cypress PSOC programmers please comment.

Travis Hayes wrote:
"Alistair George" <noname@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44b82f8d$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I went to my chip vendor who suggested instead of staying with the 8051
family to try Cypress PSOC because he said it was so easy to use as to
almost make the programmer redundant. However, in reality it seems that
when one has unusual requirements there may be a similar workload as
would be the case if I stuck with my tried and trusty 8051 variants
(inlude Atmel Mega).


I am wondering if the learning curve for a newbie to create such a
driver for PSOC would take me longer to implement than for the likes of
familiar 8051 or AVR in C.

If anyone here has been using the PSOC system, and has previous
experience with other micros I'd be particularly interested in your
comments as to the development curve for new addons, and comments in
general.

The PSoC is a 8051 core, more or less. They've added a bunch of
configuration and paging registers to fit in all the things the chips can
do. For the price, they are good chips; I like them a lot to replace
low-precision op-amps, comparators, etc. I've uses them as a slave display
driver by putting a UART and a timer in, and used them as active filters by
plugging in a 4-pole LPF with some gain on other occasions.
They are very low cost in quantity; most projects I've used them in end
up with the chip in die form, no external crystal. My stuff is normally
room temperature, so that's not an issue. The wide supply voltage is a plus
(2.7-5.5V), making it easy and cheap to do battery-powered devices.
The architecture is limited, being based on the 8051. Their tools are
reliable, but quirky. Expect to spend some time figuring out how to really
use them.
Cypress does have some PSoC-family parts that do USB, and 2.4GHz radio.
They have announced plans for improved parts with ARM-based cores and
higher-precision analog later this year.

-Travis



The PSoC is most Certainly NOT a 8051 core. It is the core from the low end Cyress USB chips. It would be great if it was. Then it could be used with 8051 tools. The core has its own pluses and minuses. It has some features like the 8052 core. But you would expect the designers to pick features they liked. I feel the lack of bit instructions makes the code bigger.

I would put it more in a PIC16 "Class" then 8052. Due to the Smaller memory. TI and Silab have better analog sections in their chips. But there cost more and do not have the blocks.

The chip certainly has many uses. Cypress should accept what it can not do. The "Data Sheets" should have the information. You should not have to look the the block data to guess if it is good. The power consumption is high they give that info now, but back then they did not.

As for me I would have to be dead sure it would work. My boss would kill me if I used it again and failed.

It is certainly a useful chip for the right applications.

.

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