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When it was learnt that Mr. Ashish Garg, Strategic Marketing Manager, Cypress Semiconductor, a BITS, Pilani Alumni, would be coming to Goa Campus, there was a keen air of anticipation among the students.

Mr Ashish Garg graduated from BITS Pilani in the year 2001 and went on to do MS from University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an active BITSAA member, and now the President of the BITSAA Silicon Valley Chapter.

What inspired so much excitement among the student was the establishment of India’s First Cypress PSoC Lab at BITS, Pilani - Goa campus. The setting up of the lab was a part of the Cypress University Alliance Vision to “Create strategic partnerships with universities to enable professors and students to work with leading edge Cypress technologies in the classrooms, lab and research projects.

Mr. Garg started his visit with an introduction to the students about PSoC Technology. PSoC (Programmable System on a chip) is latest technology from Cypress Semiconductor which combines the familiarity of a microcontroller, the configurability of an FPGA and the capabilities of an ASIC. It is a mixed signal array with onboard 8 bit controller .PSoC with an onboard controller works like a microcontroller and is programmed in C or assembly language. But PSoC consist of blocks that can be configured to perform typical MCU functions as well as atypical system functions based on the users needs and these functions can be routed to nearly any pin to an FPGA. Additionally, PSoC provides configurable digital and analog blocks that can be combined into any custom configuration completely on-chip, looking more like an ASIC.

The lecture went on to describe various commercial applications of the wonderful technology and with an introduction to the various software tools like PSoC express and PSoC programmer to work with PSoC.
The ongoing Cypress Innovator Design Challenge generated a lot of enthusiasm among the students to master this technology.

The lecture was followed by hands-on training to the 3rd year students of EEE and E&I on the PSoC kits. Mr. Garg educated the students on the use of PSoC express for developing and executing designs. The PSoC express operates on a high level of abstraction with no Assembly or C language required, thus accelerating the Embedded Design Cycle in the process.