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.

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.