v2.1 [Mar 10, 2012]
Rubber-Banding Schematic Wires
Prior to this release, mouse moves of components or wires in the schematic editor caused connections to break, requiring the user to manually move, or re-draw, wires to retain the expected functionality. With rubber-banding, moves no longer break connections - wires stretch and squeeze automatically to keep connections intact. Additionally, should a wire-break be desired, pressing the spacebar during a move will force the tool to break these connections.
Document Manager
PSoC documentation is spread across many locations - on the web and in the PSoC Creator software distribution itself. There are also many forms of documentation - datasheets, user and reference guides, application notes, blogs, forums, etc. Finding the right information can be cumbersome due to the need to manually search each of these different sources. The Document Manager feature provides a single location for users to search across all sources of known documentation to find relevant information and help for their designs. This feature is available in the Help menu within PSoC Creator 2.1.
Datasheet Tab in Workspace Explorer
Complementing the Document Manager is a new feature of the Workspace Explorer. In this window we have added a new tab labeled “Datasheets” that presents links to the selected device datasheet, reference manuals, reference guides and component datasheets to provide users a single location to locate any related document for a given design.
Analog Device Editor
Many users love the schematic capture interface and how it enables the rapid creation of analog circuits; however, in some instances users may need to dive into the lower level of details of exactly how these circuits are being routed by the software tool. The Analog Device Editor, found in the new Analog tab of the Design-Wide Resource Editor, provides this visibility and control. Within this window users can lock routes, manually re-route and select preferred analog peripheral instances easily to manually optimize an analog design.
Ohm Meter
The Analog Device Editor also provides a unique “Ohm Meter” feature that details the internal resistance associated with signal paths within the device. By right clicking on a pin or analog resource, users can select the Ohm Meter function to view what these resistance values are for any given signal path within the PSoC device. Additionally, a SPICE-compatible netlist for the passive elements of the selected route are also available for additional analysis.
Timing-Driven Placement
Timing-Driven Placement (TDP) is a build-time feature that incorporates timing constraints into the target resource selection algorithm to reduce the number of Static Timing Analysis (STA) violations in digital designs. This feature builds on the Timing-Driven Routing (TDR) feature introduced in the PSoC Creator 2.0 release to recognize timing problems and adjust placements to avoid them.
Starter Design Templates
With our new design templates, users no longer need to start with a blank design every time. Instead, when creating a new project, users are presented with a set of fully functioning and tested basic designs to provide a better starting point for a variety of designs. These starter designs include all required components, firmware and documentation to help users get started with PSoC quickly and easily.
New CyBoot and Bootloading Components
Bootloading has been redesigned in this release in order to improve its ease-of-use and to further reduce the flash footprint. Previously, the bootloading APIs were included in the cy_boot component and with the PSoC Creator 2.1 release, these are now generated from a pair of new components: Bootloader and Bootloadable. The configuration of bootloading options, which used to occur in the System Design-Wide Resource Editor, are now available by editing the component parameters for each of these components.
New Bootloadable projects are backward compatible with Bootloaders that were built in PSoC Creator 1.0 and PSoC Creator 2.0.
Additional Information and Documentation
Further details on this release are available in the below Release Notes file and should be reviewed prior to starting a new design or evaluating the PSoC Creator 2.1 release. Additionally, a migration guide is also available below to aid in the process of porting older designs into the PSoC Creator 2.1 toolset.
