infoTECH Feature

July 28, 2008

XMOS Accelerates Electronic Design with Software Defined Silicon Development Kit

XMOS Semiconductor, the creator of Software Defined Silicon, has introduced a development kit to enable development of a wide range of applications using its XS1-G4 programmable device. Designs are created using a C-based software development flow that dramatically shortens the time required to build electronic products and systems.
 
The XS1-G development kit (XDK) features the XS1-G4 target device, QVGA touch screen display, RJ45 10/100 Ethernet port, high-performance 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 (News - Alert) 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 in XC, an 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.
 
At the heart of XDK, the XS1-G4 programmable chip features four XCore tiles connected by a high-performance switch, with each tile containing an XCore processor - a 400MHz 32bit event-driven processor. The four XCore tiles together execute up to 32 concurrent real-time tasks, provide 1600MIPs, and service up to 400 million events per second. Data and code is stored in 256Kbytes of RAM and 32kBytes 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 used in a wide variety of applications and systems. They are ideal for designers that need flexibility and differentiation. The unique device features and software-based design flow make the XS1-G product family well suited for applications such as Ethernet AV and audio, intelligent LED display control, IEEE (News - Alert)-1588 network time keeping and chip-level security systems.
 
XMOS XS1-G won the prestigious Electron d'or award, adjudged by an independent panel of French electronics industry experts, for technology that has made the biggest impact in the last 12 months. XMOS beat Actel, Altera and Xilinx (News - Alert) to win the trophy in the Intellectual Property and FPGA category.
 
Mani Soundararajan is a TMCnet Contributing Editor.
 
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