XMOS design kit

The XMOS design kit is now available to anyone prepared to stump up $1,000. Built with the looks of a consumer electronics product, it allows developers using C to create applications on one of the company’s four-core XS1-G4 SDS (Software Defined Silicon)
chips
‘It dramatically shortens the time required to build
electronic_products and systems’, claims XMOS.
The kit comprises a complete hardware/software development environment with, in addition to the XS1-G4 chip, a 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 expansion ports. A set of design examples is accessible on start-up 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.
The XS1-G4 chip has 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 variety of applications and systems and is particularly suitable for Ethernet AV and audio, intelligent LED display control, IEEE-1588 network time keeping and chip-level security systems.

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