New PSoC Solution provides Highest Reliability and Support for 16 Independently Controlled Fans

The new fan control solution enables highly reliable, hardware-based fan control for the telecommunications, server and storage markets, where reliability is critical.

The combination of the PSoC programmable digital fabric and graphical configuration tools enables customers to quickly customize a complete fan control solution with just a few lines of firmware code. More information is available at www.cypress.com/go/potm.

The fan control solution is available today for production PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 devices. It is easily implemented within the PSoC Creator 2.0 IDE, which provides a fan controller component with a graphical user interface that abstracts the design complexities. Customers simply enter the electromechanical parameters found in the fan datasheets into the graphical interface and the toolset takes care of the details. Further, the PSoC fan control solution uniquely provides a hardware-based fan control and speed-regulation capability built on top of the programmable digital architecture within the PSoC devices.

Other, firmware-based solutions are difficult to design due to the complexity of combining the firmware fan control algorithms with the I2C communication firmware. PSoC’s unique hardware based approach simply avoids this issue. These complications are further exacerbated in fan tray designs where 4-12 fans are common and independent control of each fan is desired.

The new fan control solution is available as a drop-in “component” from Cypress’s PSoC Creator 2.0 design software. Components are “virtual chips” represented by an icon in Cypress’s PSoC Creator software. They are “dragged and dropped” as component icons into PSoC Creator designs and integrate system interfaces and discrete ICs into PSoC designs. To minimize time-to-market, Cypress offers the PSoC Thermal Management Expansion Board Kit (CY8CKIT-036) specifically designed for fast development and prototyping of PSoC-based fan control systems.

The fan control solution is highlighted as the current PSoC Peripheral of the Month, a program designed to highlight applications and functions that standard MCUs can’t deliver, but PSoC can. At the page, customers can learn more and download PSoC Creator free of charge and begin development of high-performance fan control applications immediately.

“Fan control is an area where PSoC shines brightly over other solutions,” said Jim Davis, Sr. Marketing Manager for Cypress’s PSoC Platform. “The graphical user interface gives PSoC customers a flexible solution that is easy to implement.”

The fan control component is available today in PSoC Creator 2.0, which users can download at www.cypress.com/go/psoccreator.