Product Review
XMOS extends xCORE multicore MCU family
Clive Maxfield1/10/2013 3:11 PM EST
Comment
abraxalito
XMOS seems to have been adopted by the higher performance audio world so now are ...
The folks at XMOS recently announced a significant extension to their family of xCORE multicore microcontrollers. Three new USB-equipped products address the processing and interfacing needs of a broad range of embedded applications. The new products are the U10-128, the U12-128, and the U16-128, which provide 10, 12, and 16 logical cores, respectively, and deliver up to 1000 MIPS of deterministic parallel compute power, along with 128K Bytes of on-chip RAM.
“These new xCORE-USB devices allow us to hit the ‘sweet spot’ in a much broader range of USB-enabled applications,” said Dr Paul Neil, VP of Product Management, XMOS. “Now we can offer not only outstanding performance, but also a complete family of products at a variety of different price-performance levels.”
The new devices join the existing xCORE-USB offering, the eight-core/64KB RAM U8-64 (also marked SU01), which was announced earlier this year. The entire family takes full advantage of the recently announced xSOFTip range of software-based peripherals and processing blocks, which include I2S, TDM, SPDIF, and AES/EBU processing. A wide range of audio DSP blocks are also available including filters, equalizers, stereo spatalization, and mixers.
The devices incorporate a High Speed USB 2.0 PHY and unlike other microcontrollers can support 480Mbps data-rates and USB Audio Class 2. This allows the xCORE-USB device family to address a range of demanding applications including high performance peripherals, audiophile consumer audio, sound-bars, multi-channel USB audio interfaces, DJ products, USB speakers, and protocol conversion plus bridging.
Other features include a multichannel 12bit 1MSPS analog to digital converter, standby and deep sleep modes for energy-sensitive applications, power on reset, watchdog timer, brownout detection and integrated oscillator circuits.
The xCORE architecture uses a 32bit multicore technology with hardware response to deliver deterministic performance and complete I/O flexibility with a simple high level C programming environment. These latest additions to the xCORE family mean that designers can choose the amount of processing power and DSP they need, resulting in a solution that is much more tightly tailored to the requirement than was previously possible. The low latency and determinism of the architecture allows even demanding time-critical functions such as interfacing and media delivery to be addressed in software, with hardware levels of response.
xCORE devices are supported by the xTIMEcomposer Studio development tools, which give the designer access to the power of multicore processing in a familiar C/C++ environment. Unique in embedded processor development systems, xTIMEcomposer Studio includes static timing analysis and cycle-accurate simulation tools, making it easy for designers to meet precise real-time requirements. The XMOS development tools are available to download free of charge at www.xmos.com/tools
The XS1-U8-64 is available now, priced from $6.00 in volume. The XS1-U16-128 is sampling now and available in production quantities in Q1 2013, priced $9.75 in volume. The XS1 U10-128 and XS1-U12-128 will be sampling in Q1 2013, with pricing starting at $7.60.
Further details are available from an XMOS sales representative: www.xmos.com/products/distributors
For more information on XMOS products including development kits and software, please visit www.xmos.com
If you found this article to be interest, visit Microcontroller / MCU Designline where – in addition to my Max's Cool Beans blogs on all sorts of "stuff" – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to all aspects of designing and using microcontrollers.
Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).
Last but certainly not least, make sure you check out all of the discussions and other information resources at All Programmable Planet. For example, in addition to blogs by yours truly, microcontroller expert Duane Benson is learning how to use FPGAs to augment (sometimes replace) the MCUs in his robot (and other) projects.
“These new xCORE-USB devices allow us to hit the ‘sweet spot’ in a much broader range of USB-enabled applications,” said Dr Paul Neil, VP of Product Management, XMOS. “Now we can offer not only outstanding performance, but also a complete family of products at a variety of different price-performance levels.”
The new devices join the existing xCORE-USB offering, the eight-core/64KB RAM U8-64 (also marked SU01), which was announced earlier this year. The entire family takes full advantage of the recently announced xSOFTip range of software-based peripherals and processing blocks, which include I2S, TDM, SPDIF, and AES/EBU processing. A wide range of audio DSP blocks are also available including filters, equalizers, stereo spatalization, and mixers.
The devices incorporate a High Speed USB 2.0 PHY and unlike other microcontrollers can support 480Mbps data-rates and USB Audio Class 2. This allows the xCORE-USB device family to address a range of demanding applications including high performance peripherals, audiophile consumer audio, sound-bars, multi-channel USB audio interfaces, DJ products, USB speakers, and protocol conversion plus bridging.
Other features include a multichannel 12bit 1MSPS analog to digital converter, standby and deep sleep modes for energy-sensitive applications, power on reset, watchdog timer, brownout detection and integrated oscillator circuits.
The xCORE architecture uses a 32bit multicore technology with hardware response to deliver deterministic performance and complete I/O flexibility with a simple high level C programming environment. These latest additions to the xCORE family mean that designers can choose the amount of processing power and DSP they need, resulting in a solution that is much more tightly tailored to the requirement than was previously possible. The low latency and determinism of the architecture allows even demanding time-critical functions such as interfacing and media delivery to be addressed in software, with hardware levels of response.
xCORE devices are supported by the xTIMEcomposer Studio development tools, which give the designer access to the power of multicore processing in a familiar C/C++ environment. Unique in embedded processor development systems, xTIMEcomposer Studio includes static timing analysis and cycle-accurate simulation tools, making it easy for designers to meet precise real-time requirements. The XMOS development tools are available to download free of charge at www.xmos.com/tools
The XS1-U8-64 is available now, priced from $6.00 in volume. The XS1-U16-128 is sampling now and available in production quantities in Q1 2013, priced $9.75 in volume. The XS1 U10-128 and XS1-U12-128 will be sampling in Q1 2013, with pricing starting at $7.60.
Further details are available from an XMOS sales representative: www.xmos.com/products/distributors
For more information on XMOS products including development kits and software, please visit www.xmos.com
If you found this article to be interest, visit Microcontroller / MCU Designline where – in addition to my Max's Cool Beans blogs on all sorts of "stuff" – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to all aspects of designing and using microcontrollers.
Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).
Last but certainly not least, make sure you check out all of the discussions and other information resources at All Programmable Planet. For example, in addition to blogs by yours truly, microcontroller expert Duane Benson is learning how to use FPGAs to augment (sometimes replace) the MCUs in his robot (and other) projects.
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abraxalito
1/11/2013 3:45 AM EST
XMOS seems to have been adopted by the higher performance audio world so now are delivering product targetted more to that niche. But the niche itself isn't really big enough and originally XMOS's USP was that it was a flexible solution able to be configured to a plethora of interfaces. Once the interfaces become standard ones (S/PDIF, TDM, I2S, UAC2 ) then hardware beats software hands down.
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