Cypress Semiconductor choose Embedded World in Nuremberg last week to highlight its growing portfolio of SoC, microcontroller, and Bluetooth Low Energy products and design tools for IoT developers. Specifically, the company debuted its PSoC 4 S-Series devices and demonstrated its PSoC Creator integrated design environment (see related article).
In a phone interview before Embedded World, Samer Bahou, public relations manager, noted that Cypress completed its merger with Spansion in March 2015 and that the companies had offered complementary portfolios without a lot of overlap. Since the completion of the merger, the merged company has introduced more than 180 new devices in Cypress’s PSoC 4 family and more than 150 new devices in the FM4 and FM0+ Flexible Microcontroller families originally developed by Spansion. Cypress’s current broad offering, Bahou said, exhibits the common themes of low power consumption and fast time to market (through drag-and-drop software tools) to address the diversity of IoT applications.
Also in the phone interview, Jim Davis senior product marketing manager, said an application area of particular interest is the smart home, with its smart appliances such as washers, for which Cypress makes devices that can implement the human-machine interface (with 2D/3D graphics acceleration and touch capacitive interfaces) and provide functions such as drum vibration analysis, inductive door locking, and water-pump control.
Davis said Cypress is also seeing a lot of product adoption in the wearables market—for example, in smart watches and fitness bands. He didn’t cite specific brands, but independently published teardowns indicate where the Cypress devices are finding use—see here, for example.
In addition to introducing the new PSoC 4 S-Series devices at Embedded World 2016, Cypress highlighted these products:
- PSoC 4 L-Series flexible one-chip ARM Cortex-M0 solutions for smart-home appliances and industrial internet applications;
- three series of FM4 products that provide fast, secure, and reliable communication interfaces for factory automation and smart-home appliance applications;
- two series of FM0+ products that deliver ultralow power consumption for portable IoT applications;
- EZ-BLE PSoC integrated Bluetooth Low Energy module; and
- PSoC 4 BLE and PRoC BLE programmable radio-on-chip solutions fully qualified for the Bluetooth 4.2 standard.
Cypress also demonstrated a light-powered IoT beacon solution based on Cypress’s energy harvesting PMIC and EZ-BLE PRoC module that eliminates the need to replace batteries, significantly reducing maintenance costs. The company also presented a Bluetooth Smart Mesh demonstration showing an implementation for smart-home lighting applications.
In a press release issued before Embedded World, Hassane El-Khoury, executive vice president of the Programmable Systems Division at Cypress, said, “We have completed the hard work on Cypress’s merger and integration with Spansion, and we are now firing on all cylinders with a stronger mix of products, especially for our focus automotive and industrial markets, as well as for the Internet of Things. We are driven to continue expanding our portfolio of embedded solutions with new features and capabilities to help our customers create innovative and differentiated products. A premier example was the recent introduction of our first Traveo automotive MCUs on 40-nm process technology, which marks a key step in the evolution of our broader MCU and PSoC portfolio.”
