Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: CY) today announced the final stage
for the PSoC®
4 Smarter Life Design Challenge, a global design competition
promoting the use of systems-on-chip to develop intelligent,
forward-looking systems for homes, offices and cars.
Hosted on the award-winning element14
community, the design challenge leverages the easy-to-use PSoC 4
Pioneer Kit, enabling embedded engineers and hobbyists to create unique
designs with the flexibility of the PSoC 4 programmable system-on-chip.
Cypress and element14 selected 15 Road Test winners based on their
design abstracts, and each of the winners have received a free Pioneer
kit plus a $500 voucher to element14’s retail sites to buy the
additional materials needed to build their design.
In addition to the Road Test winners, all other interested designers can
still participate in the challenge by creating blog posts on their
design ideas on the element14 PSoC Pioneer community by December 16,
2013 to be considered for the prizes. Final design submissions are due
January 17, 2014. The winner will be determined by a vote on the
element14 Community, which offers design engineers a space to share
project concepts with nearly 200,000 members. The grand-prize winner
will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to network and showcase his or
her winning PSoC 4 Smarter Life design at Embedded World 2014 – the
largest embedded conference of its kind – which takes place in
Nuremberg, Germany from February 25-27, 2014. Other prizes include
additional vouchers worth $1500 at element14’s retail sites. More
information on the design challenge, including blog posts by the
finalists about their innovative projects, is available at www.element14.com/SmarterLife.
“The Smarter Life Design Challenge encourages embedded designers to look
at new ways to bring smarter sensing and computing technology to
everyday applications,” said John Weil, senior director of PSoC
Marketing and Applications for Cypress. “Challenge finalists are
building intelligence into everything from wheelchairs to personal
security systems to coffee makers. We look forward to seeing these truly
innovative systems in action.”
“Despite the prevalence of computers, most of our daily environments and
the things within them fail to utilize computing power to intercept
problems or improve performance,” said Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of
Community, element14. “We’re incredibly excited to see what the
participants in the Smarter Life Design Challenge create, as we believe
the builds could have real-world implications that make people’s lives
easier.”
Smarter Life Design Challenge finalists provided the following comments
on designing with PSoC 4 and the Pioneer Kit in blog posts on www.element14.com/SmarterLife:
“Technology makes a quantum leap now and then. The PSoC 4 and some of
the components I plan to use for this project will show the remarkable
advancements towards greater functionality with greater ease and
simplicity.”
“…the PSoC guys have done a very good job of making it simple to make
basic capabilities with just a few clicks. The PSoC 4 board is a great
opportunity for new users to do some impressive things.”
“PSoC - The Electronic Duct Tape!”
“It is an amazing technology with its programmable analog and digital
hardware fully integrated into the software.”
The PSoC 4 architecture combines Cypress’s best-in-class PSoC analog and
digital fabric and industry-leading CapSense® capacitive
touch technology with ARM®’s power-efficient Cortex™-M0 core.
The truly scalable, cost-efficient architecture delivers PSoC’s
trademark flexibility, analog performance and integration, along with
access to dozens of free PSoC Components™—“free embedded ICs”
represented by icons in Cypress’s PSoC Creator™ integrated design
environment. The new PSoC 4 device class will challenge proprietary
8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), along with other 32-bit
devices.
The PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit is an easy-to-use and inexpensive development
platform enabling unique designs with the flexibility of PSoC. The kit
is also highly expandable with Arduino shields and Digilent Pmod
compatible headers, and it has hundreds of example projects to help
developers start designs in the free PSoC Creator IDE.
MCUs Can’t. PSoC Can.
PSoC devices employ a highly configurable system-on-chip architecture
for embedded control design, offering a flash-based equivalent of a
field-programmable ASIC without lead-time or NRE penalties. PSoC devices
integrate configurable analog and digital circuits, controlled by an
on-chip microcontroller, providing both enhanced design revision
capability and component count savings. A single PSoC device can
integrate a wide range of peripheral functions saving customers design
time, board space and power consumption while improving system quality
and reducing system cost.
The flexible PSoC resources allow designers to future-proof their
products by enabling firmware-based changes during design, validation,
production, and even in the field. The unique PSoC flexibility shortens
design cycle time and allows for late-breaking feature enhancements. All
PSoC devices are also dynamically reconfigurable, enabling designers to
morph internal resources on-the-fly, utilizing fewer components to
perform a given task. More information about PSoC products is available
at www.cypress.com/psoc
and free online training is at www.cypress.com/psoctraining.
About Cypress
Cypress delivers high-performance, mixed-signal, programmable solutions
that provide customers with rapid time-to-market and exceptional system
value. Cypress offerings include the flagship PSoC 1, PSoC 3, PSoC 4,
and PSoC 5LP programmable system-on-chip families. Cypress is the world
leader in capacitive user interface solutions including CapSense®
touch sensing, TrueTouch® touchscreens, and trackpad
solutions for notebook PCs and peripherals. Cypress is a world leader in
USB controllers, which enhance connectivity and performance in a wide
range of consumer and industrial products. Cypress is also the world
leader in SRAM and nonvolatile RAM memories. Cypress serves numerous
major markets, including consumer, mobile handsets, computation, data
communications, automotive, industrial, and military. Cypress trades on
the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol CY. Visit
Cypress online at www.cypress.com.
Cypress, the Cypress logo, PSoC, CapSense, and TrueTouch are registered
trademarks and PSoC Creator and PSoC Components are trademarks of
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. All other trademarks are property of their
owners.
Copyright Business Wire 2013