A range of modular development boards and software has been released by XMOS to assist designers deploying the company’s xCORE range of multicore microcontrollers.
This comes in the form of the company’s new sliceKIT that consists of a core board powered by a 16-core xCORE multicore microcontroller and is equipped with four expansion slots that can be populated with I/O extension cards (or ‘slices’).
This kit is aligned with the company’s xTIMEcomposer Studio and xSOFTip soft peripherals. The devices in this range are configured with the company’s xSOFTip IP blocks and are programmed in C, with real-time extensions, via the same flow.
“sliceKIT provides a platform for embedded designs that is very flexible,” said Nigel Toon, CEO, XMOS. “Our xCORE devices can be configured to support a range of interfaces and peripherals; you can add capabilities that you won’t find in other microcontrollers.
“With XMOS you can put down the interfaces you need to match your exact requirements – sliceKIT provides a hardware development platform that matches your system requirement.”
Based on the 32-bit xCORE L2 multicore microcontroller, the core board is said to deliver up to 1000MIPS performance that has the added capability to be dynamically shared across up to 16 cores. This is said to allow the device to support multiple, concurrent, real-time tasks that are completely deterministic.
The kit is described as incorporating on-board real-time debugging capabilities that allow designers to perform timing-accurate analysis on the performance of their application code.
The company advises that each sliceKIT I/O slice is supplied complete with a demo application for ease of hardware configuration. Slices connect to the processor board using PCIe style connectors, which is said to simplify the interchange with hardware configurations.
The company advises it is also encouraging designers to build their own I/O slices if they have custom requirements.
The company’s xCORE real-time multicore microcontrollers are programmed in C or C++ with supported extensions that are said to make it easy to define concurrent parallel tasks running on different processor cores.
The devices can be software-configured within the same design flow with a choice of I/O and peripherals.
This kit is initially available as a starter kit, consisting of an L2 multicore processor board, GPIO and Ethernet slice cards, plus the xTAG real-time debug adapter. It is supported by xTIMEcomposer Studio. This comprises of an integrated design environment, a LLVM compiler, debugger, the company’sxSOFTip configuration tool, cycle-accurate simulator with waveform view, and its xScope high speed in-circuit instrumentation and timing analyser.
Xmos
