Cypress Ships 50 Millionth PSoC(R) Device

Milestone Confirms Accelerating Adoption of Highly Integrated, Mixed-Signal Architecture in Consumer, Handsets, Industrial and Automotive Systems

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Dec. 19, 2005--Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE:CY) today announced that it has shipped over 50 million Programmable System-on-Chip(R) (PSoC(TM)) mixed-signal array devices, demonstrating wide acceptance of this high-performance, cost-effective, mixed-signal integration platform. Cypress is currently shipping PSoC devices to more than 1,000 customers in Asia, Europe and the U.S. in applications as diverse as consumer electronics, handsets, networking equipment, industrial systems, and automotive systems.

"In just a little more than three full years of production, PSoC sales compare favorably with the industry's most successful embedded component offerings over their comparable phase of product life," said George Saul, vice president of Cypress's PSoC business. "The ubiquitous appeal of PSoC revolves around the design flexibility offered by its configurable mixed signal architecture. With a few keystrokes, customers change their mix of ADCs, DACs, PWMs, timers, counters and filters; modify their interface from SPI to I2C to USB; and make nearly unlimited IO assignments. And they can modify the device any number of times and actually trigger device reconfiguration on-the-fly, in-system."

Max Baron, principal analyst for market research firm In-Stat (Scottsdale, Arizona), said, "PSoC's user-configurable, mixed-signal system architecture has shown strong growth due to its flexibility and software tools that can configure and integrate digital and analog functions."

CapSense Solution Increases Demand

The strong PSoC growth has recently been accelerated by worldwide demand for Cypress's new CapSense solution for capacitive touch interfaces. A single CapSense device can replace dozens of mechanical switches and controls with simple, touch-sensitive controls. CapSense-based "button" and slider controls are more reliable than their mechanical counterparts because they are not prone to the environmental wear-and-tear that affects exposed buttons and switches. CapSense solutions have been implemented in numerous systems and applications, including LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company's hot new LG-KV5900 Cyon(TM) Slider mobile phones.

Capacity Increases to Meet Growing Demand

In response to the rapidly growing demand for CapSense and other PSoC products, Cypress has taken steps to increase manufacturing capacity. In the third quarter of 2005, the company qualified PSoC production in its high-volume Fab 4 facility in Bloomington, Minnesota. Cypress also recently announced plans to begin PSoC production at Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (GSMC) in Shanghai in the third quarter of 2006.

About the PSoC Family

PSoC devices are configurable mixed signal arrays that integrate a fast 8-bit microcontroller with many peripheral functions typically found in an embedded design. PSoC devices provide the advantages of an ASIC without the ASIC NRE or turn-around time. A single PSoC device can integrate as many as 100 peripheral functions with a microcontroller, saving customers design time, board space and power consumption. Customers can save from 5 cents to as much as $10 in system costs. Easy to use development tools enable designers to select configurable library elements to provide analog functions such as amplifiers, ADCs, DACs, filters and comparators and digital functions such as timers, counters, PWMs, SPI and UARTs. The PSoC family's analog features include rail-to-rail inputs, programmable gain amplifiers and up to 14-bit ADCs with exceptionally low noise, input leakage and voltage offset. PSoC devices include up to 32KB of Flash memory, 2KB of SRAM, an 8x8 multiplier with 32-bit accumulator, power and sleep monitoring circuits, and hardware I2C communications.

All PSoC devices are dynamically reconfigurable, enabling designers to create new system functions on-the-fly. Designers can achieve more than 120 percent utilization of the die in many cases, by reconfiguring the same silicon for different functions at different times. In the automotive PSoC LIN bus reference design, the same digital blocks are reconfigured four times to support the different LIN communication modes; in doing so, these blocks consume less than 10 percent of PSoC hardware resources and less than 10 percent of the PSoC MCU cycles.

About Cypress

Cypress solutions are at the heart of any system that is built to perform: consumer, computation, data communications, automotive, industrial, and solar power. Leveraging a strong commitment to customer service and performance-based process and manufacturing expertise, Cypress's product portfolio includes a broad selection of wired and wireless USB devices, CMOS image sensors, timing solutions, network search engines, specialty memories, high-bandwidth synchronous and micropower memory products, optical solutions, and reconfigurable mixed-signal arrays. Cypress stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CY. More information about the company is available online at www.cypress.com.