EEWeb PULSE How about development tools? Early on you mentioned some professional development tools that are free. Can you elaborate on some of your development tools that are available for designers? We’ve put a lot of effort into this. Certainly over the last 6 months we’ve focused a huge amount on improving, making the tools easy to use, and making sure that the results that you get, such as code size and runtime performance, are absolutely the best in class. We’re calling this new release of
Having created a user design, we’ve also, and this is very unique in terms of software development environments, we’ve got a static timing analyzer. You can actually look at your design, and ask, “from this input occurring how quickly does my control loop respond?” and you can see that happen really quickly, and deterministically, on the xCORE processor. We’ve also got cycle-accurate simulators as well. This allows you to actually look at the simulation for your design, and see the software controlling the real systems.
package. For the debugger, there is a debug adapter which actually we build using one of our own chips at a very low cost – about ten bucks off of the Digikey website. Is XMOS a fabless company? Yes, we’re a fabless company. We build in 65 nanometers through TSMC, so more advanced process technology than you’re used to seeing other microcontroller companies using. This allows us to really get the performance that is possible with our chips, and also to keep the size and the cost very very low.
“The whole point of the company is to build out and expand the customer base – to get more and more people using the technology and build a very broad customer base for our technology.” the tools xTIMEcomposer. They’re available off our new website that we’ve just launched. What you have in there is an Eclipse, industry standard GUI Development environment, and LLVM compilers for C and C++. We’ve actually got some extensions in these that allow you to really control timing and the multicore aspects of the designs. You can easily describe multiple tasks you are trying to run in different cores or parallel code that you want to run in parallel or on different cores. There’s some simple extensions you can use in C to achieve that.
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We have some debug capabilities that allow you to get into, for instance, a logic analyzer, and look at what’s happening on the pins as well as what’s happening inside the devices, unobtrusivley. This really makes designing, debugging, and developing these complex real-time systems much, much simpler. And all of the features, your timing analyzer and the ability to debug with this logic analyzer, those all come as part of the software package? They’re all part of the software
EEWeb | Electrical Engineering Community
We’re a private company; we’re funded by venture capital and we’ve had about $40 million in investments in the company so far. We’re very well funded, with tier-1 VCs supporting us. The whole point of the company is to build out and expand the customer base – to get more and more people using the technology and build a very broad customer base for our technology. We’re based here in Bristol, in the U.K., which is where I’m sitting today, but we’ve also started to expand and build a facility in Chennai, in India, as well.