XMOS Semiconductor, the Bristol consumer chip start-up, is building and shipping a stylish development kit to its top 50 customers.

"We'll have development kits in the hands of 50 lead customers by the end of this quarter", James Foster, CEO of XMOS, told Electronics Weekly.

Asked how the 50 had been chosen, Foster replied: "We've had engagements with a large number of companies. The 50 lead customers are companies which are either using a function which only we can provide, or are pointed to a set of applications where we offer massive value, where the alternative solution would be 20 or 30 times more expensive."

The XMOS chip which offers a single-core 400MIPS programmable silicon for $1, or a four core chip for $10, allows the engineers at XMOS' consumer company customers to programme functions into silicon using C.

"Consumer electronics companies don't have many people who can programme in Verilog but lots who can programme in C", said Foster.

The XMOS approach avoids another disadvantage of FPGAs, that they are increasingly moving to more fixed functionality with hard macros dedicated to particular applications. "The FPGA people are making ASSPs with some FPGA fabric" said Foster, "that's not our focus.

"Creating a broad-play business is one of the most valid investment decisions because of the huge multiple in the valuation", said Foster, "point-to-point businesses are valued at much less."

With inexpensive system silicon, and a C-based design flow, XMOS intends to crack the long-sought after goal of significantly expanding programmable solutions into traditional logic market sectors i.e. Asic, ASSP and standard logic. It's something the FPGA people have been trying to do, without much success, for 20 years. "We extend the programmable market to new price points which the FPGA people can't meet," says Foster.

Surely the FPGA people have $1 chips?" "But you can only do minor interface things, with them" responds Foster.

He sees the XMOS product called SDS (software defined silicon) as the semiconductor industry's next fundamental building block after TTL and FPGA.

"TTL had Boolean language, FPGA had Verilog and VHDL, SDS has System C tools which allow engineers to capture functions and merge them into hardware. It's fun", said Foster, "it brings the fun back to engineering again after the burden of the huge software tools used by ASSPs. This opens it up again, it's a revolution not only in silicon, but in development flow."

It's an industry sea-change which will underpin XMOS' ambitions to be a major semiconductor player. 'We're building a monster", said Foster.

XMOS is the brainchild of Transputer architect Professor David May FRS, Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University, who acts as CTO of the company. May told Electronics Weekly that he is actively involved in engaging with the XMOS customer base.

Read more on the XMOS Semiconductor developments on Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners.

See also: The development kit resource centre DEVmonkey. It includes dev kit ratings, reviews, news, plus more resources for design engineers. It also includes the "2 Minute Review" - a quick, hands-on evaluation of a kit - who needs it, what's in it, quick facts to know and what design engineers can do with it. Visit www.developmentmonkey.com