Do you want your app or device to do routing, controlling, buffering, counting, timing, going into sleep mode when it is not in active use? Where we needed lots of hardware in the past, we now have the cheap and easy-to-use PSoC (or programmable system-on-chip) developed by Cypress. Basically, what it does is deliver the building blocks that the engineer can write a code for to tell it what to do. In many cases, the code already exists and just needs to be retrieved from the library that comes with the architecture. As a result, building a system has been much simplified.

Both digital and analog resources can be used on the PSoC. Examples are:

• operation amplifier or reductor
• A2D

Typically, the PSoC consists of four elements: an analog system, a digital system, the PSoC core that includes the CPU, and the system resources. Within these, the blocks can vary, but even within the same part family lots of variations can be applied, due to a number of oscillators, DACs and PGAs that are already built-in. Each of those blocks has its own identifier in the form of a code that shows whether it is analog or digital, where it is and what its function is. The blocks are divided into columns, each of which is dedicated to a bus output.

The system on chip has some very clear advantages:

• Its CPU is embedded.
• Its low power.
• It has clock resource and can go to sleep so it won’t interfere.