Today, XMOS Semiconductor, the fabless semiconductor company
from Bristol, launches itself onto the market after two years
developing its products in stealth mode.
The company’s first prototype products are currently at TSMC. In Q4
07, technical details of the architecture and beta tool
availability will be announced, and in Q1 08, the first device
family, launched at price points between $1 and $10, will be
introduced along with development tools and a software IP
library.
“Low-cost is always the most interesting place to be,” said
David May FRS, CTO of XMOS and professor of computer science at
Bristol University. XMOS’ chips are one tenth the cost of current
FPGA chips but they will have enough performance to support
200Mbit/s Ethernet, 7MSPS 16-tap FIR or 500MIPS control
software.
The products are a new class of semiconductor devices called
software defined semiconductor devices (SDS) aimed at bringing
low-cost user programmability to the consumer electronics industry.
The chips are programmable in C.
Like the Inmos Transputer, for which May was also the architect,
the
XMOS architecture is an array of parallel processing cores. It
is an event-driven processing engine with pin control integrated
within the core (Xcore) allowing the entire system, including
interfaces to be implemented in software. XCore-to-Xcore
communications capability allows arrays of cores to be built
up.
The market need for SDS devices is the dearth of innovation in the
consumer electronics industry. “This is all driven by the cost of
state of the art ASIC going up and up,” said May, “so designers
have to design chips that cover the whole world market. That
strangles innovation. Innovation has been squeezed out of consumer
electronics.”
“We want to develop a third party IP community”, added May, “the
opportunities for developers are enormous. People haven’t been able
to anything innovative because of the cost of Asic. If you use Asic
you have to raise a few million dollars. It wasn’t like that, you
used to be able to do it in a garage. C allows you to develop IP
very very rapidly.”
SDS chips will allow consumer companies to try out concepts quickly
and cheaply. “To do consumer electronics well you have to
experiment in the market by trying products out on customers”, said
May, “you have to have a fast way of finding what works and what
doesn’t.”
XMOS has venture capital backing from Hermann Hauser’s VC fund,
Amadeus Capital Partners, and from Esprit Capital Partners. It has
a team of 23 people in Bristol. CEO is James Foster, formerly CEO
of Oxford Semiconductor, and vp of marketing is Noel Hurley,
formerly of ARM.
“When we talked to high volume consumer electronics companies, one
of the issues they’re having is differentiation,” said Hurley,
“they tell us: ‘I receive my reference design, I’ve got the
software drivers already ported to it. The big issue is that, so do
all my competitors. So how do I differentiate my product?’”
SDS provides differentiation. “Customers have software engineers
who understand C,” added Hurley.
Read more on the
XMOS Semiconductor developments on Mannerisms, the
blog of David Manners.