System-on-chip was custom-built for the Internet of Things

By “Max” Maxfield, EE Times

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving. It's not so long ago that the term “IoT Device” made you immediately think of something with an 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) that consumed relatively power and offered relatively little performance. How things have changed…

Rather than have “dumb” IoT devices capturing raw data and passing this data “up-the-chain” for processing, there's an increasing trend to perform “processing on the edge.” This means that the IoT device pre-processes the raw data, boils it down, and packages it up into useful information that it then hands-off to higher-level systems.

Unfortunately, as the devices on the edge become increasingly intelligent, they provide more attack vectors into the system. Thus, in addition to processing on the edge, there is also a trend toward security on the edge.

Last but not least, while many IoT devices employ wired connections to other systems and the Internet and Cloud, there's also an increasing trend toward wireless solutions.

PSoC 6 dual-core MCU architecture example (Source: Cypress)

Programmable System-on-Chip (PSoC) devices from Cypress Semiconductor boast a sophisticated mixture of programmable analog fabric and programmable digital fabric augmented with a hard MCU core and hard peripheral cores.

In order to address the IoT requirements noted above, the folks at Cypress Semiconductor have just announced the PSoC 6, which they describe as being “Purpose-Built for the IoT.” The PSoC 6 is the first PSoC family to support dual, heterogeneous processors — a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 running at up to 150-MHz and a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ running at up to 100-MHz, all supported by 1MB of Flash and 288KB of RAM.

Learn the details from the full story on our sister site, EE Times .