XMOS
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| Private | |
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Founded | July 2005, Bristol, UK |
| Headquarters | Bristol, United Kingdom |
| Products | Voice controllers, Multicore microcontrollers, xCore, xCORE-200, xCORE-AUDIO, xTIMEcomposer |
| Brands | xCORE |
| Website | http://www.xmos.com/ |
XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company that develops voice products, audio products, and multicore microcontrollers capable of concurrently executing real-time tasks, DSP, and control flow. XMOS micro controllers are distinguished by their deterministic (predictable) behavior.
XMOS was founded in July 2005 by Ali Dixon (then final-year student at the University of Bristol), James Foster (former CEO of Oxford Semiconductor), Noel Hurley, David May (former chief architect of Inmos), and Hitesh Mehta (Acacia Capital Partners). It received seed funding from the University of Bristol enterprise fund, and Wyvern seed fund (formerly the Sulis Seedcorn fund).
The name XMOS is a loose reference to Inmos. Some concepts found in XMOS technology (such as channels and threads) are part of the Transputer legacy.
In the autumn of 2006, XMOS secured funding from Amadeus Capital Partners, DFJ Esprit, and Foundation Capital. It also has strategic investors Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Huawei Technologies, and Xilinx Inc.
XMOS' processor technology is general-purpose and has been exploited in a range of different markets, including voice, microphone arrays, audio, LED tiles, communications, and robotics. This enables third parties to establish products and businesses based around the technology.
In December 2009, XMOS launched a community website, the XCore Exchange as a site to enable and encourage innovative and entrepreneurial discussion and collaboration.
XMOS has developed families of silicon devices and software based on xCORE technology:
XMOS coined the term Software Defined Silicon to describe hardware devices that can be programmed to implement low level I/O protocols. XMOS describes its processors as event-driven.
xCORE multicore microcontrollers comprise one or more processor tiles connected by a high-speed switch. Each processor tile is a conventional RISC processor that can execute a up to eight tasks concurrently. Tasks can communicate with each other over channels (that can connect to tasks on the local tile, or to tasks on remote tiles), or using memory (within a tile only).
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