Date: 22/01/2018

Cypress announces two new products for automotive

Cypress Semiconductor is offering production volumes of 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity chips to vehicles. The new Cypress CYW89359 combo features Simultaneous Dual Band (RSDB) technology enabling two unique data streams to run at full throughput simultaneously, by integrating two complete Wi-Fi subsystems into a single chip. These Ics supports both 2.4- and 5-GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi and dual-mode Bluetooth/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) simultaneously.

The RSDB architecture of the CYW89359 enables Apple CarPlay and a Wi-Fi Hotspot to operate same time. The CYW89359 is fully automotive qualified with AECQ-100 grade-3 validation.

“People now expect to enjoy the same connectivity, rich multimedia content and user experience in a vehicle that they get at home,” said Brian Bedrosian, vice president of marketing for the IoT Business Unit at Cypress. “Cypress’ new CYW89359 combo solution has made the vision of all the passengers in a car connecting at once and each streaming their own high-fidelity video and audio content a reality. Not only is this the highest-performance Wi-Fi device in our IoT portfolio, but the solution meets our automotive customers’ rigorous requirements for reliability and safety for in-vehicle applications.”

Cypress Semiconductor also introduced a new automotive capacitive touchscreen controller family for car infotainment systems. TrueTouch CYAT817 touchscreen controller family meet tough automotive quality standards. CYAT817 features an advanced hover capability to detect a finger up to 35 mm above the screen and a force touch capability that provides accurate measurement of the pressure applied by multiple independent fingers. CYAT817 also feature integrated acoustic and haptic feedback control provides faster response times.

“Car makers’ requirements for the infotainment user interface are significantly different from those of consumer electronics touchscreens, but up until now, touchscreen solutions have been developed primarily for the consumer market and only qualified later to meet automotive requirements,” said Dr. Jing Mu, Senior Director of Automotive HMI Marketing at Cypress. “Cypress designed the TrueTouch CYAT817 family from the start with a focus on providing automotive-grade quality and enabling the ultimate user experience for in-vehicle applications. This integrated solution demonstrates our market leadership with best-in-class response times, unmatched features in a single device and lower system costs compared to multi-chip implementations.”

Host interfaces I2C and SPI, and CAN are supported by CYAT817. The controllers protect against hacking with a cryptographic engine that securely encrypts communication with the head-unit, preventing unauthorized access of touch data containing sensitive user information that could allow reverse engineering of PINs or passwords.

Cypress AutoArmor meets car manufacturers’ most challenging EMC requirements for chip-level emissions (IEC 61967), conducted (IEC 62132) and radiated (ISO 11452) immunity, and for system-level (CISPR 25) specs. AutoArmor uses automatic frequency hopping to prevent false touches caused by EMI from other electronic systems, and it uses TX frequency spreading to reduce electromagnetic emissions by up to 30%.

Availability of CYAT817: Second quarter of 2018. The controllers are available in automotive-friendly 128-pin and 100-pin TQFP packages.