Issue
141 March 2002
You
Too Can Design with SoC
A
Design Challenge 2002 Primer
byJeff
Bachiochi
With cash prizes on
the line in the PSoC Design Challenge, Jeff details
working in the world of SoC. Anyone new to designing
with SoC parts will walk away with enough insight to
implement a SoC in their next project.
Start
•
PSoC •
Clocking • Interrupts •
Digital Blocks
• Analog
•
PSOC
Designer •
Project
Application •
Sources & PDF
Reducing the
number of components in a circuit has many benefits. The
most obvious yield is inventory and assembly cost savings.
Circuitry requires varying amounts of both analog and
digital components. For the most part, analog circuitry
requires the majority of components. So, improvements
in analog devices will have a major effect on the overall
component count.
You’ve seen
the micro grow to include internal RAM and reprogrammable
ROM. It was a natural progression for these micros to
begin including digital peripherals as well, like UARTs,
counters, timers, and PWMs. The core processor now has
a ton of models with various permutations. You’ve no doubt
used one of those white blobs to make a prototype. You
stick all of your components into an array of small contact
buses and then interconnect them using small jumper wires.
Imagine if manufacturers gave you the ability to use this
technique within a single chip!
Application-specific
integrated circuit (ASIC) manufacturers have been filling
a niche for a long time. Mixed-signal ASICs reduce your
parts count by offering a way to include all of your circuitry
on the same chip. However, the outcome is specific to
your particular design and no changes can be made without
producing a new ASIC.
Cypress Microsystems
changed the rules when it introduced a family of programmable
System-on-a-Chip (SoC) microcontrollers. The CY8C25/26xxx
combines a fast core, RAM data memory, reprogrammable
code memory, and digital and analog blocks onto the single
chip. These blocks can act like different peripherals
each time you reconfigure them. Configuration of all of
the blocks is mapped into the register space of the core
(see Figure 1).
|
(Click
here to enlarge)
|
Figure 1—The CY8C2xxx
microcontroller goes way beyond the basic core with
on-chip RAM and flash memory. The general-purpose
I/O interfaces internally to programmable interconnections
for both analog and digital blocks. |
