XMOS Semiconductor, the creator of Software Defined Silicon (SDS), is using the CoSy compiler development system from ACE Associated Compiler Experts in the development of the tool suite for its XCore processor. An event driven, multi-threaded processor, XCore is programmed using C and the XMOS originated XC language, which adds support for parallel processing, event driven control and time-driven programming models.
The XCore 32-bit RISC processor provides up to eight threads and is integrated with support resources into a building block called the XCore tile. Offering up to 400MIPs per tile, XCore has the performance to implement multiple complex real-time hardware and software functions, from simple I/O interfaces through to complete software applications. The first product family of XCore-based devices is to be announced during Q2 2008.
XMOS VP Engineering Mark Lippett said, “Licensing CoSy from ACE meant we could rapidly accelerate the development of our tool set compilers and focus resources on our XC programming language, a key ingredient for taking advantage of the power of our multi-threaded hardware. ACE’s in-depth experience of developing parallelizing compilers for some very unique target architectures made them the perfect partner to work with on what is a completely new class of programmable semiconductor.”
