New peripherals, power features added to PSoC Creator IDE

PSoC Creator Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the hardware/software co-design environment from Cypress Semiconductor Corp., has been updated with new features to ease the creation process for developers.

Designed for the PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 programmable system-on-chip (SoC) families, PSoC Creator now boasts of enhanced low-power design techniques, new LCD design capabilities and faster, easier CapSense capacitive sensing design, according to Cypress Semiconductor. While the previous version combines a state-of-the-art software development IDE with a revolutionary graphical design editor with dozens of pre-configured analog and digital peripherals that can be used in the schematic design, the latest version adds support for very low power designs with per-component control over sleep and hibernate behavior, two new LCD graphics components and Cypress' SmartSense algorithm for on-the-fly calibration of CapSense applications.

Users also receive free, fully functional compilers with no code size limitations for both the PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 device families. The Keil PK51 Professional Developer's Kit for PSoC 3 and the CodeSourcery Sourcery G++ Lite Edition for PSoC 5 come bundled with the PSoC Creator distribution. A debugger is also built into PSoC Creator to support the on-chip JTAG and serial wire debug functionality in PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 devices. Keil RTX51 Tiny, Micrium?C/OS-III, and SEGGER embOS are some of the real-time operating systems supported iby PSoC Creator.

The new LCD graphics components in PSoc Creator are one that uses the popular i8080 interface to communicate with the LCD panel and another that has direct control of the panel, driving the control signals and managing the frame buffer in an external SRAM.