how do PSoCs compare to AVRs and PICs?

among

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There aren't any cheap or free C compilers available for it.

The are like pears and apples. PSoCs are a cpu kernel with some generic analog circuit. Wheras the PIC and AVR are a cpu, some digital peripherals and usually an ADC.

Rene

I think most hobbyists are familiar with the AVRs and PICs and are sticking with them. PSoC is only a few years old. It's definitly significant departure from the typical peripherals found on AVR and PICs with much more flexible routing and setup.

As far as comparing, the CPU is probably comparable with mid-range PIC. AVRs have better number crunching ability than the PSoC. The configurability of the PSoC peripherals is untouchable for now. It really goes a long way in reducing the number of other parts on the board, however some of the analog bits are so-so.

Untill recently, Cypress hasn't attempted to push the PSoC for the hobbiest market, and there haven't been any affordable development tools for the chip. I suspect this new design contest will start changing that.

-J

PoSC's are much slower than the AVR. I recall that they use something like 10 or 12 clock cycles per instruction. Where as AVR can do one instruction per clock cycle by using pipelining for most instructions. Perhaps if speed is not important they might be useful.

regards, Johnny.

I think you're exaggerating the clock cycles by about a factor of 2, but, regardless, the Cypress processor's architecture and instruction set is quite primitive compared to the AVR.

The PSoC instruction set nemonics actually look like 8051 to me, minus R0 indirect addressing and bit addressable RAM.

Most of the instructions are in the 5-7 cycle range, with RMW types taking around 8 or 9, and the CPU runs up to 24 Mhz.

The CPU isn't the best, but I have seen a diagram of the chip die, and the CPU takes up around %5 of the space, the I2C controller actually consumes more room! The majority of die space is dedicated to the configurable blocks, especially the analog hardware and muxes.

I was never a fan of the mid-range pic, the banking and scratch-pad RAM were all screwed up AFAIK. Why i/o registers where plopped in the same linear address range as general purpose ram, I will never know. The cypress CPU is a bit slower, but coding is alot easier compared to the PIC.

-Jim

among

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Hi Jim,

I agree with your comments about the anachronisms of the PIC. That is why I mention the AVR. I think the PIC is not so bad if you are coding in assembly, but not as well suited to c compilers for the reasons you mention. Since the latest AVRs have been released about 1 year ago with reduced die sizes, they are very competitive if you are looking at performance per dollar compared to PIC.

regards, Johnny.

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