XMOS ships 300th development kit

3rd December 2008

ES Admin

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XMOS, the creator of Software Defined Silicon, has announced the shipment of 300 development kits in the two months following their introduction. Take-up of the XMOS development kits has been worldwide, covering a diverse range of users and a broad spectrum of applications, from networked audio and LED display panel control through to industrial automation. Two-thirds have gone to commercial users, a third to research and academia.

Supporting the company’s XS1-G family of multi-core programmable devices, there are two development kit options available to give designers a choice of complete hardware platforms. The XMOS Development Kit (XDK) provides a rich range of peripheral interfaces supporting a QVGA touch screen, stereo ADC/DAC, 10/100 Ethernet, SD card, USB and general-purpose expansion I/O. The credit-card sized XC-1 development kit supports basic I/O with LEDs, a speaker for use with a 1-bit DAC, a breadboard area and expansion headers.

Both kits come with access to the web-based and desktop design tool suites, which include compilers, simulator and debugger. The company’s unique C-based software development flow aims to dramatically accelerate electronic product design cycles.

James Foster, XMOS’ CEO commented, “The positive response to our two development kits is a real indicator of market appetite for a programmable solution that is easy to use and cost effective. Major OEMs, government research labs and start-ups have all been purchasing development kits at our on-line store and it’s exciting to see that our philosophy of implementing hardware tasks in software is being embraced so broadly and quickly.”

Central to the XMOS development kits is the XS1-G4 programmable chip, providing four 32-bit, XCore event-driven processors, capable of executing up to 32 simultaneous real-time tasks and managing up to 400 million events per second. With 1600MIPS performance, 256Kbytes of RAM and 32Kbytes of ROM, the chip handles a broad range of hardware and software functions, from I/O interfaces through to DSP algorithms.