PSoC Was One of the Most Underrated Embedded Platforms
I was a strong advocate for Cypress’s PSoC line for years—not because of a marketing pitch, but because it let me solve real hardware problems without changing hardware. It gave embedded developers a level of flexibility most chips just didn’t offer. Instead of hardwiring your design into silicon, PSoC let you define and rewire your circuitry in software—routing signals, configuring logic blocks, and tuning analog front ends after the board was already built.
The first PSoC I worked with—what eventually got called PSoC 1—had an 8-bit M8C core that was surprisingly capable for its day. It was often referred to as “mouse guts” because it found a home in low-cost peripherals, but it could do real work. The switched-capacitor analog blocks let you emulate op-amps, filters, and comparators in silicon, not software. No polling, no wasteful cycles—just efficient, silicon-based function blocks controlled through firmware.
The next generation moved more toward digital CPLD-style configurability, keeping the routing matrix but replacing much of the analog emulation with fixed-function digital logic. PSoC 3 was the first real attempt to push analog behavior into digital domains, letting you model analog behavior with high-speed logic and get repeatability and control beyond what you could do with analog components alone.
Then PSoC 5 stepped in with a full ARM Cortex-M3 core and really brought the horsepower. It preserved the same core idea—firmware-defined hardware—but added precision analog and the performance needed for more complex systems. You could do data acquisition, filtering, control, and communications, all inside a single chip with no FPGA, no external ADC, and no glue logic.
PSoC 4 and PSoC 6 came later, tailored more toward the modern connected world. PSoC 4 brought power efficiency and capacitive sensing (CapSense) to cost-sensitive designs. PSoC 6 went further, adding BLE, dual cores, and secure connectivity—more of a nod to IoT and mobile integration—but still grounded in the same PSoC philosophy: hardware that you shape with firmware.
What always made PSoC stand out was this idea that your hardware design didn’t have to be frozen at PCB layout. You could build a product that could change, adapt, or recover in the field—reconfiguring timers, remapping communication buses, or swapping signal paths with a firmware update. You didn’t need to simulate behavior with software or burn power on a general-purpose CPU loop. You just told the chip what it was, and it became that.
In a world where every MCU family claims to be "flexible," PSoC actually meant it.
