Cypress Adds Windows Vista™ Support To PSoC Designer™ Integrated Development Environment

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE: CY) today announced that its popular PSoC Designer™ Integrated Development Environment (IDE) now supports PCs running Microsoft’s new Vista™ operating system. PSoC Designer Release 4.4 also integrates new “user modules” for Cypress’s industry leading CapSense capacitive sensing solution, SD Cards, and USB-UARTs. It includes all previous releases and service packs, enabling designers to download a single file over the Internet worldwide.

PSoC Designer helps users harness the power and flexibility of PSoC® mixed-signal arrays by providing “drag and drop” system design capability. This powerful, easy-to-use IDE comes with pre-configured, pre-characterized embedded peripheral functions called user modules and extensive user assistance in the form of “help” dialog boxes, pull-down menus and other graphical user interface aids.

User modules take the configurable PSoC devices and create useful functions as diverse as counters, timers and PWMs, analog converters, both ADCs and DACs, communications links like UARTs, SPI and I2C, as well as comparators, programmable gain blocks, filters and even bootloaders. Each User Module includes the hardware configuration data, startup code, an interrupt service routine when required, and a set of APIs. These APIs, or application programming interface software functions, provide instant control of all aspects of the user module. This innovative approach helps the designer get to a fully functional custom device without weeks or months of tiresome datasheet scouring, tedious low-level coding and repetitive debugging. For example, Cypress released two new CapSense user modules last week that implement optimized capacitive sensing algorithms.

PSoC Designer is complemented by Cypress’s revolutionary PSoC Express™ visual embedded design tool. PSoC Express offers users the fastest, easiest way to create embedded designs in the industry. Users can create designs in PSoC Express and then seamlessly transfer them to PSoC Designer to optimize functionality for specific applications.

“Of the many strengths of PSoC, ease of design is a critical factor in helping our customers get to market first with robust, innovative products,” said Jon Pearson, director of PSoC Development Tools for Cypress. “PSoC Designer 4.4 is a comprehensive release that provides a complete solution to our customers in one, easy-to-download package.”