XMOS introduces development kit for software-silicon combination
XMOS Semiconductor Ltd. (Bristol, England) has introduced a development kit for its XS1-G4 programmable device. Designs are created using a C-based software development flow, which the company claims shortens the time required to build electronic products and systems.
The XS1-G development kit features the XS1-G4 target device, a QVGA touch screen display, RJ45 10/100 Ethernet port, a stereo audio interface and XLink connectors for connecting multiple kits together. The XS1-G4 can be booted from JTAG, an SD/MMC card or on-board SPI boot PROM. In addition to the integrated multi-media I/O, designers have access to on-board switches, status LEDs and IDC expansion ports. A set of design examples is accessible on startup through a soft-key menu system.
The XS1-G4 device is programmed using web-based XMOS development tools which include C and XC compilers, simulator and debugger. The kit includes a tutorial on XC, which is the XMOS-originated programming language supporting parallelism, concurrent and real-time programming using channel-based communications, and event-driven control. Programs can be evaluated using the simulator, or loaded into the XDK for hardware verification. A GDB debugger is also provided to simplify program development.
The XS1-G4 programmable chip features four XCore tiles connected by a high-performance switch, with each tile containing an XCore, which is a 400MHz 32-bit event-driven processor. The four XCore tiles together execute up to 32 concurrent real-time tasks, provide 1600-MIPS of performance, and service up to 400 million events per second. Data and code is stored in 256-kbytes of RAM and 32-kbytes of ROM. Tightly coupled to a highly flexible I/O pin structure, the XCore processor can implement a range of hardware and software functions including I/O interfaces, state machines, application programs, DSP and cryptographic algorithms.
XMOS devices are general-purpose programmable chips. The device features and software-based design flow make the XS1-G product family well-suited for applications such as Ethernet audiovisuals and audio, intelligent LED display control, IEEE-1588 network time keeping and chip-level security systems. Additional information on how XMOS technology supports these applications can be found on the XMOS website.
