Re: Cypress PSOC programmers please comment.

"Neil" <NeilKurzm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Travis Hayes wrote:
"Alistair George" <noname@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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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

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.

Ok, I will admit it's not 100% compatible to an 8051. My original statement
of "the PSoC is a 8051 core, more or less" perhaps was misleading. The
original poster said a vendor "suggested instead of staying with the 8051
family to try Cypress PSOC." Prformance-wise, I think it is on the same
level as many of the 8051-like chips out there. I agree that the lack of
bit manipulations is a hinderance. My biggest gripe is the
accumulator-based instruction set. It seems that just about everything has
to go through the accumulator, which is a serious bottleneck, compared to
register-to-register based architectures out there. It is definitely
targeted to low-end stuff; the largest part you can get is 32K, with 2K of
RAM. Recently, it seems that Cypress is pushing them hard for
capacative-touch applications, and all but forgot that many of us aren't
building iPods.

We both agree that it is a fine chip in its place, and not suitable for
everything. The price is right, if the part fits the application.

-Travis


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