Cypress Semiconductor, the embedded solutions leader, today unveiled the PSoC® 4700 series of microcontrollers (MCUs) that uses inductive sensing to detect touch inputs for products using metal surfaces. Consumer, industrial, and automotive products are using metallic materials to differentiate with their customers through improved aesthetics. The new series frees developers to incorporate these metals by making inductive sensing as easy to use as Cypress’ industry-leading CapSense® solutions for capacitive-sensing. By empowering developers to solve their capacitive and inductive sensing problems, the PSoC 4700 series is the ideal choice for modern, state-of-the-art industrial design.

The PSoC 4700 inductive sensing solution is supported in Cypress’ PSoC Creator™ Integrated Design Environment (IDE), which allows users to drag and drop production-ready hardware blocks, including the new inductive sensing capability, into a design and easily configure them via a simple graphical user interface.

“Customers want to improve the aesthetics and reliability of their products with high-quality metallic user interfaces,” said John Weil, vice president of the MCU business unit at Cypress. “Inductive-sensing technology is ideal for these applications, however, it has been difficult for customers to implement due to manufacturing variability. The PSoC 4700 MCU series overcomes this problem by leveraging our 15 years of experience with CapSense and SmartSense™ Autotuning to offer an easy-to-use, tunable inductive-sensing solution.”

The PSoC 4700 MCUs are based on a 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M0+ core and integrate programmable analog and digital blocks. The devices can support up to 16 sensors to implement digital functions or custom algorithms for interfaces in various form-factors, including buttons, linear and rotary encoders, proximity sensing or free-form. The PSoC 4700 inductive-sensing solution provides superior noise immunity for reliable operation, even in extreme environmental conditions. The highly integrated solution enables cost-efficient system designs by reducing bill-of-material costs.

Cypress’ free PSoC Creator IDE simplifies system design by enabling concurrent hardware and firmware development using PSoC Components—embedded ICs represented by an icon in the IDE. Engineers can easily configure the programmable analog and digital blocks in PSoC by dragging and dropping components on the PSoC Creator schematic and customizing them with graphical component configuration tools. The tool features auto-calibration that automatically compensates for manufacturing variations.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Businesswire.