XMOS Semiconductor, the consumer electronics chip start-up, will take in its first sales revenues this month, and will have its first production silicon out next quarter. It may have the effect of making standards unnecessary.
"This month, July, we're getting our first revenues", said Mark Lippett, vice president of engineering at XMOS, "and production silicon of the XS1-G4 is due in Q4."
The XS1-G4 has four XCore tiles with up to 32 software threads, 1600 total MIPs and 256KBytes of single cycle memory. The XCores are event-driven processors which sleep until kicked into action by some event requiring them to work.
Programmable in C, the chips, called Silicon Defined Software (SDS) can be adapted "before, during or after the point of sale," said Lippett.
That has a significant implication: "One of the things that can make it very disruptive is because it makes it unnecessary to have any standards," said XMOS co-founder and CTO, Professor David May FRS, Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University and the architect of the Transputer.
Currently, XMOS is working with customers on getting products based on its SDS chips out into the market.
"We've engaged with over 40 customers, but we have decided on five we can give quality support to, we're not big enough to support 20 customers", said Lippett.
In the first quarter of next year, the company brings out its hobbyist design kit and robotics design kit.
"We want to allow people to be electronics hobbyists again", said Lippett, "it has been dead for many years, because electronics design has become so complicated. We're giving the opportunity for a great deal of creativity once again. It's a uniquely affordable technology."
Currently the company is working on a reference design for the 802.1AS (audio/video bridging) standard. "We're confident we'll be able to produce a reference design," said Lippett.
In Q209 it intends to bring out its industrial design kit and automotive design kit.
"We set out to solve certain challenges," said Lippett. First: electronics products rely on standards but they change so often. How do you differentiate?"
"Second: software designers outnumber hardware designers by 10-1. Third: C-based hardware flows are awkward. Processors and fast I/O haven't mixed well. Fourth: business demands flexible yet stable platforms. Companies need to maximise ROI by re-using designs and supporting fast turn-cycles and market changes."
"The idea to build XMOS came to me in 2000-2001", said May. "My view in 2000 was that the development of state of the art ASIC was going to get more difficult as costs were going up It was impossible to raise money at that time and I shelved the idea. In 2003-4 a bright student came to my office asking for an interesting project and I took this out of my drawer and said: 'Try this.'"
"We used the University labs to develop this, and then we looked around for a CEO, and we found James Foster, and put together a serious business plan," said May, "it now costs $100m to do a state of the art ASIC, and no investor will put $100m into an ASIC chip company. Even big companies find it difficult to make a business case to do it."
May's concluded: "We need to find a way to move into more generic platform technologies and our investors also thought that this is the way things will have to go."
"What if you could start a semiconductor company with $100,000 again?" is one of Foster's favourite maxims. "Our NREs are less than $100,000 and our prototype lead-time is 30 seconds," according to Foster, making $100,000 semiconductor start-ups possible again. Anyone who can programme in C, who can get their hands on an XMOS development kit and an XMOS SDS chip, can bring an IC to market.
XMOS sees its SDS concept as a natural progression along the semiconductor industry's route to bring greater flexibility to the designer.
In the 1960s, in the Age of TTL, the industry had maybe 100,000 designers using pen and paper and designed with little flexibility.
In the 1980s, in the Digital Age, a million designers, utilising schematics and HDLs, designed FPGAs and SOCs around gate-level flexibility.
Now, in the Software Age, 10m+ coders/designers in the world use C to deliver system-level flexibility.
See also: Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners. Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows. Sign up for the Mannerisms eNewsletter.