Cypress ships 1 billionth PSoC

SAN JOSE, USA: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. announced that it has shipped the billionth unit of its fast-growing programmable system-on-chip (PSoC). The billionth unit went to General Electric for a medical application that takes advantage of PSoC’s programmable analog and digital resources for multiple functions.

PSoC is the world’s only programmable analog and digital embedded design platform. It combines analog and digital peripheral controllers with memory on a single piece of silicon, maximizing designers’ flexibility. The PSoC ramp is among the fastest in the history of embedded systems, and continues to accelerate. Commercial-scale shipments began in 2002, and Cypress shipped its 100-millionth unit in 2006. Cypress reached 250 million units in 2007, 500 million units in 2009, and 750 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The billionth unit was determined to have shipped on July 19 at 11:22 AM Pacific Daylight Time. Duane Harrison of North Carolina, USA, entered the closest guess for the shipment time and will receive a new NOOK Color eReader, which includes a PSoC-based TrueTouch touchscreen controller.

“PSoC represents one of the greatest successes in Cypress history, driving a seminal change in all parts of the company,” said T.J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress.

“It is a prime example of how our start-up strategy works—a great idea is incubated by a small, highly-motivated start-up team with the support of our well-established infrastructure. We delivered a new embedded design paradigm that provides flexibility and integration unlike any other alternative. This milestone is more exciting because we are just getting started. Our PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 families are now ramping, and they open up markets and applications that multiply our opportunities by a factor of 10. Beyond that, new PSoC families are already under development that we believe will continue to separate us from our competitors.”

PSoC’s unique architecture of programmable analog and digital resources integrated with a microcontroller delivers a number of important benefits to system designers, including time-to-market, the ability to react to change, reduced components due to integration, power savings, inventory reduction, and supplier consolidation. All of these benefits are important factors in PSoC’s growth story. The PSoC architecture is also at the core of other Cypress offerings, such as the TrueTouch touchscreen solution, CapSense touch-sensing and PowerPSoC controllers for LED lighting.

The PSoC 3 and 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3-based PSoC 5 families, which deliver unparalleled integration and flexibility across 8-, 16-, and 32-bit applications, dramatically expand the served available market for PSoC products to applications such as industrial products, automotive, medical and more.

Among the thousands of PSoC customers worldwide are market leaders such as HP, Cisco, Motorola, IBM, Honeywell, Samsung, LG, Lenovo, Haier, Acer, HTC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Nintendo, Sharp, Suzuki, Philips, BMW, and Gaggia. PSoC devices are at the heart of a dizzying variety of applications, including home appliances; cell/smart phone set-top box platforms; electric toothbrushes; air cleaners; e-bikes; high-definition televisions; digital cameras; remote-control hobbyist helicopters; computer mice, printers, and other PC peripherals; health and fitness equipment; automobile sound systems, satellite radios, and engine control units; medical equipment; lighting; motorized baby strollers; oscilloscopes; and MP3 players.