Xmos brings programmable networking to Gigabit Ethernet

Xmos has launched a series of microcontrollers based on its timesliced multicore architecture that adds Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

The xCore-200 has support for 16 hardware threads, delivering up to 2000MIPS of instruction throughput. This provides the ability to have a fully programmable media-access control (MAC) layer for specialised forms of Ethernet, such as time-aware variants, together with higher-level functions such as webserver support.

Xmos CEO Nigel Toon claimed: “This next generation xCore-200 product family delivers twice the performance and four times the on-chip SRAM memory, when compared to our first generation xCore multicore microcontrollers.”

As well as a 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet port, the xCore-200 has a programmable USB 2.0 interface, and up to 2Mbytes of on-chip flash memory. The company has sampled the device to early customers such as Cisco who are working on industrial and automotive applications, ranging from control systems to audio processing.

Andy Lobato, CEO of Helitune, said: “Our advanced system monitoring applications need the fastest response times and full timing synchronization and determinism in a very small package so that we can capture and process multiple critical sensing elements in real-time. The xCore-200 multicore microcontroller family, which we can program and configure entirely in software, is a perfect fit for this demanding application.”

Tom Knesel, president of Pivitec, added: “This new xCore-200 family allows us to extend our digital audio mixer and audio interface capabilities to create up to 128 high-resolution digital audio channels all on a single, low cost, deterministic and flexible, multicore platform.”

Xmos said it will add 24 and 32 thread versions in the second half of 2015.