Chipcenter's Paul O'Shea says . . . Cypress Semiconductor announced immediate availability of production volumes of the CY22xxx family of field-programmable clock generators. Operating at speeds up to 200 MHz, the timing devices provide highly stable, easily configurable clock outputs for use in a wide range of commercial and consumer applications, including switches, routers, computers, DVD players, and digital cameras. Furthermore, they can optimize a programmable clock for each application, guaranteeing peak performance. As companies push to create a greater variety of communications and connectivity applications and bring them to market in the shortest possible time, component engineers who can no longer qualify a large number of custom solutions are pushing to standardize product development around programmable clocks.
Manufacturers also benefit from easier inventory management.
Since these devices can be programmed with different personalities, excess inventory can be re-targeted for different applications instead of being sold for pennies on the dollar. The revenue from general purpose oscillators has been flat to down over the last ten years, usurped by the custom clock chips that go into PC motherboards, notebooks, and printers. That shift also points to one of the reasons why there has been a healthy growth rate of custom clocks and programmable clocks over the last five years. The Cypress CY223xx products are basically PLL-type devices that provide clocks. The CY223xx devices are the company's second generation of field programmable clocks.