Smarter Life Design Challenge Gives Embedded Engineers and Hobbyists The Chance to Showcase Designs, with Winner to Present at Embedded World 2014

SAN JOSE, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — November 21, 2013 — Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: CY) today announced the final stage for the PSoC^® 4 Smarter Life Design Challenge, a global design competition promoting the use of systems-on-chip to develop intelligent, forward-looking systems for homes, offices and cars.

Hosted on the award-winning element14 community, the design challenge leverages the easy-to-use PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit, enabling embedded engineers and hobbyists to create unique designs with the flexibility of the PSoC 4 programmable system-on-chip. Cypress and element14 selected 15 Road Test winners based on their design abstracts, and each of the winners have received a free Pioneer kit plus a $500 voucher to element14’s retail sites to buy the additional materials needed to build their design.

In addition to the Road Test winners, all other interested designers can still participate in the challenge by creating blog posts on their design ideas on the element14 PSoC Pioneer community by December 16, 2013 to be considered for the prizes. Final design submissions are due January 17, 2014. The winner will be determined by a vote on the element14 Community, which offers design engineers a space to share project concepts with nearly 200,000 members. The grand-prize winner will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to network and showcase his or her winning PSoC 4 Smarter Life design at Embedded World 2014 – the largest embedded conference of its kind – which takes place in Nuremberg, Germany from February 25-27, 2014. Other prizes include additional vouchers worth $1500 at element14’s retail sites. More information on the design challenge, including blog posts by the finalists about their innovative projects, is available at www.element14.com/SmarterLife.

“The Smarter Life Design Challenge encourages embedded designers to look at new ways to bring smarter sensing and computing technology to everyday applications,” said John Weil, senior director of PSoC Marketing and Applications for Cypress. “Challenge finalists are building intelligence into everything from wheelchairs to personal security systems to coffee makers. We look forward to seeing these truly innovative systems in action.”

“Despite the prevalence of computers, most of our daily environments and the things within them fail to utilize computing power to intercept problems or improve performance,” said Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of Community, element14. “We’re incredibly excited to see what the participants in the Smarter Life Design Challenge create, as we believe the builds could have real-world implications that make people’s lives easier.”

Smarter Life Design Challenge finalists provided the following comments on designing with PSoC 4 and the Pioneer Kit in blog posts on www.element14.com/SmarterLife:

“Technology makes a quantum leap now and then. The PSoC 4 and some of the components I plan to use for this project will show the remarkable advancements towards greater functionality with greater ease and simplicity.”

“…the PSoC guys have done a very good job of making it simple to make basic capabilities with just a few clicks. The PSoC 4 board is a great opportunity for new users to do some impressive things.”

“PSoC - The Electronic Duct Tape!”

“It is an amazing technology with its programmable analog and digital hardware fully integrated into the software.”

The PSoC 4 architecture combines Cypress’s best-in-class PSoC analog and digital fabric and industry-leading CapSense^® capacitive touch technology with ARM^®’s power-efficient Cortex™-M0 core. The truly scalable, cost-efficient architecture delivers PSoC’s trademark flexibility, analog performance and integration, along with access to dozens of free PSoC Components™—“free embedded ICs” represented by icons in Cypress’s PSoC Creator™ integrated design environment. The new PSoC 4 device class will challenge proprietary 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), along with other 32-bit devices.

The PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit is an easy-to-use and inexpensive development platform enabling unique designs with the flexibility of PSoC. The kit is also highly expandable with Arduino shields and Digilent Pmod compatible headers, and it has hundreds of example projects to help developers start designs in the free PSoC Creator IDE.

MCUs Can’t. PSoC Can.

PSoC devices employ a highly configurable system-on-chip architecture for embedded control design, offering a flash-based equivalent of a field-programmable ASIC without lead-time or NRE penalties. PSoC devices integrate configurable analog and digital circuits, controlled by an on-chip microcontroller, providing both enhanced design revision capability and component count savings. A single PSoC device can integrate a wide range of peripheral functions saving customers design time, board space and power consumption while improving system quality and reducing system cost.

The flexible PSoC resources allow designers to future-proof their products by enabling firmware-based changes during design, validation, production, and even in the field. The unique PSoC flexibility shortens design cycle time and allows for late-breaking feature enhancements. All PSoC devices are also dynamically reconfigurable, enabling designers to morph internal resources on-the-fly, utilizing fewer components to perform a given task. More information about PSoC products is available at www.cypress.com/psoc and free online training is at www.cypress.com/psoctraining .