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.

See http://www.xmos.com