LYNNWOOD, Wash., June 23, 2004 - Cypress MicroSystems Inc., a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE: CY) announced the winners of the "$30,000 International PSoC(TM) Design Contest". Sponsored by CMP Media (CMP), a publisher of leading technical publications for design engineers worldwide, the contest challenged embedded system designers to develop innovative electronics applications based on the Cypress MicroSystems' flexible Programmable System-on-Chip(TM) SoC technology.  The configurable PSoC family is a mixed-signal integration platform that can be programmed to perform the functions of virtually any embedded application, enabling designers to bring low-cost, single-chip systems to market quickly.

"The contest challenged engineers to create unique, real-world designs that utilize the PSoC's broad range of on-chip configurable analog and digital blocks," said John McDonald, product marketing director for Cypress MicroSystems. "We are pleased to see that the contest garnered so much interest and enthusiasm from the engineering community. The dozens  of diverse design entries highlight the versatility of the device and the ability of individual engineers to develop a PSoC-based application in less than three  months. The entries also demonstrate the ease with which products employing PSoC and its associated PSoC Developer 4.1 tools can be brought to market."

Phan Minh Tan of Vietnam was awarded the grand prize of $10,000 for the design and development of a temperature, humidity and dew-point monitoring solution using a PSoC CY8C26xxx device. Minh Tan praised the PSoC for its integration of analog and digital functions, low power consumption and low cost and noted that solutions with the ability to monitor agricultural, industrial and medical goods in storage are in very high demand.

First place prizes of $3,000 were awarded to: Pam Howell, Michigan; Vineet Kumar Singh, India; and Jan Prins, Netherlands. Second place prizes of $2,000 were awarded to: Chris Mesibov, New York; Sunil Jha, India; and Wim Hendrikse, Netherlands. Third place prizes of $1,000 were awarded to: Dimitrios Pantazis, Illinois; Tsogjaukhlan Tumurbaater, Mongolia; and Dino Federigi, Italy. The award for "Best use of Dynamic Reconfigurability" was presented to Ahmed Asim Ghouri, Pakistan, and the "Best use of Analog PSoC Blocks" award was presented to Alexandru Plesco, Romania.

Howell's winning design supplements a gasoline single-cylinder generator engine with a PSoC controlled gaseous fuel-injection system that allows for the use of compressed natural gas or liquid propane gas in residential backup generators. The fuel-injection module is based on the PSoC CY8C27xxx device.

Other winning entries making use of the PSoC mixed-signal array in embedded design include a smart water detector that can control external pumps and protect against freezing conditions; and a high-reliability analog filter that can compensate for faulty sub-components in situations where the hardware is not easily accessible.

An independent judge from each geographic region of the CMP editorial staff selected the winning design based on originality, feasibility, manufacturability and how well the implementation used the PSoC device.

About the PSoC Family

A true system-on-a-chip, PSoC devices are configurable mixed signal arrays that integrate the microcontroller and related peripheral circuits typically found in an embedded design. Employing easy to use development tools, designers select configurable, pre-characterized library elements to provide analog functions such as amplifiers, ADCs, DACs, filters and comparators and digital functions such as timers, counters, PWMs, SPI and UARTs. PSoC analog performance is instrumentation-quality - including rail-to-rail inputs, programmable gain, 14-bit ADCs and exceptionally low noise and input leakage and voltage offset.

In addition to these configurable analog and digital blocks, PSoC devices include a fast 8-bit microcontroller, up to 32KB of Flash memory, 2KB of SRAM, an 8x8 multiplier with 32-bit accumulator, power and sleep monitoring circuits, a precision real time clock and hardware I²C communications.

All PSoC devices are dynamically reconfigurable, enabling designers to create new system functions on-the-fly. Re-configuring the same silicon for different functions on different clock cycles, designers can achieve more than 120 percent utilization of the die in many cases. In the automotive PSoC LIN bus reference design, the same transistors are re-configured four times to support the different LIN communication modes; in doing so, these blocks consume less than 10 percent of PSoC hardware resources and less than 10 percent of the PSoC MCU cycles.

Software and Support

The software development environment, PSoC Designer 4.1 is a full-featured, GUI-based design tool suite that enables the user to configure their design in silicon with simple point and click options; code the MCU in either C or assembly language; and debug the design using sophisticated features such as event triggers and multiple break points while single-stepping through the code in C or assembly or a mix of the two.

The CY3205-DK Professional Class Development Kit includes a full-speed in-circuit emulator with a large trace buffer, which seamlessly integrates with PSoC Designer 4.1." The development kit includes everything necessary to complete a design with the PSoC family of ICs. The kits also contain all materials for the first four "Tele-training" classes offered on line by Cypress. The tools are designed to keep the cost of development to a minimum while providing all the features found in tools that cost $2,000 or more. The CY3205-DK is priced at $398.

About Cypress MicroSystems

Headquartered in Lynnwood, Wash., Cypress MicroSystems develops and markets Programmable System-on-Chip (PSoC) devices - high-performance, field-programmable mixed signal integration products for high-volume embedded control functions in consumer, industrial, office automation, telecom and automotive applications. Established as a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation (NYSE: CY), Cypress MicroSystems' stockholders are its employees and Cypress Semiconductor. The close association with Cypress Semiconductor allows access to their process and design technology, and field sales and applications forces. More information about Cypress MicroSystems and its products-as well as access to over 150 PSoC applications notes-is available online at https://www.cypress.com.

About Cypress

Cypress Semiconductor Corp." (NYSE: CY) is Connecting From Last Mile to First Mile(TM) with high-performance solutions for personal, network access, enterprise, metro switch and core communications-system applications. Cypress Connects(TM) using wireless, wireline, digital and optical transmission standards, including USB, Fibre Channel, SONET/SDH, Gigabit Ethernet and DWDM. Leveraging its process and system-level expertise, Cypress makes industry-leading physical layer devices, framers and network search engines, along with a broad portfolio of high-bandwidth memories, timing technology solutions and reconfigurable mixed-signal arrays. More information about Cypress is accessible online at https://www.cypress.com.

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Cypress and the Cypress logo are registered trademarks of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. "Connecting From Last Mile to First Mile", "Cypress Connects", Programmable System-on-Chip, and PSoC are trademarks of Cypress. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.