Cypress Launches Platform Development Kit for iPhone and iPod

The easy-to-use PSoC-based development platform enables highly-integrated modular design of functions such as capacitive touch-sensing, LCD segment drive and much more for traditional iPhone and iPod accessories such as audio docks and speakers, chargers and automotive products. The platform also opens up a new realm of accessories that can leverage the 480 x 320 touchscreen display and many other features of the iPhone and iPod touch for a myriad of markets and applications, including health and wellness, point-of-sale, RFID and diagnostics, and instrumentation tools. Details on the new kit are available at www.cypress.com/go/cy8ckit-023, and for more information on the Made for iPod program, visit http://developer.apple.com/ipod.

When used in conjunction with the PSoC Development Kit, the PSoC Expansion Board Kit For iPhone & iPod Accessories offers support for Cypress’s recently announced PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 product families, as well as the PSoC 1 family. PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 devices extend the world’s only programmable analog and digital embedded design platform, delivering unmatched time-to-market, integration and flexibility across 8-, 16-, and 32-bit applications. The platform is powered by the revolutionary PSoC Creator™ Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which introduces a unique schematic-based design methodology along with fully tested, pre-packaged analog and digital peripherals easily customizable through user-intuitive wizards and APIs to meet specific design requirements. The PSoC 1 family delivers similar ease-of-use and flexibility with a cost-optimized core, and is supported by the powerful PSoC Designer™ software tool.

“The popularity of the iPhone and iPod has developers rushing to create a wide range of accessories, and even more so now that they can leverage their multi-touch interfaces and widescreen displays,” said Norm Taffe, executive vice president of the Consumer and Computation Division at Cypress. ”The flexibility of our PSoC platform helps developers quickly design products with differentiating features, make last-minute changes and still hit market windows. They can also reuse the IP they develop across multiple product variations.”

The PSoC Expansion Board Kit For iPhone & iPod Accessories features a plug-in board that connects to the PSoC Development Kit, enabling PSoC to communicate with the iPhone and iPod. The kit showcases the capabilities for developers to record to and play from an iPhone or iPod with a microphone input and speaker output on the plug-in board, while simultaneously highlighting PSoC’s capabilities to power CapSense capacitive touch-sensing buttons and sliders for playback control as well as drive an LCD to display metadata from multimedia. The kit also comes with an iPhone app and a PSoC project example to demonstrate communication between iPhone apps and accessories. Additionally, Cypress plans to release a full assortment of other plug-in boards that each interface to a variety of electronic sensors and actuators and perform various application functions such as audio processing, Controller Area Network (CAN), high precision analog sensors, QVGA graphics and more.