XMOS


XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company that develops voice solutions, audio products, and multicore microcontrollers capable of concurrently executing real-time tasks, DSP, edge AI processing, and control flow. XMOS microcontrollers are distinguished by their deterministic behavior.

Company history

XMOS was founded in July 2005 by Ali Dixon, James Foster, Noel Hurley, David May, and Hitesh Mehta. It received seed funding from the University of Bristol enterprise fund, and Wyvern seed fund.
The name XMOS is a loose reference to Inmos. Some concepts found in XMOS technology 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. In September 2017, XMOS secured
$15M in an investment round lead by Infineon.
XMOS's 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 July 2017, XMOS acquired SETEM, a company that specialises in audio algorithms for source separation.

Products

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.

Voice processing

XMOS launched its first microphone array for voice capture in 2016 for far-field voice capture applications.
In November 2016 XMOS partnered with Sensory, Inc. to deliver TrulyHandsfree voice control technology on XMOS voice processing platforms.
In March 2017, Infineon Technologies and XMOS demonstrated a combination of radar and silicon microphone sensors from Infineon and audio processor from XMOS at GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The XVF3000 family of far-field voice processors announced in June 2017 includes voice pre-processing DSP for adaptive beamforming, full-duplex acoustic echo cancellation with barge-in, noise suppression, automatic gain control.
In October 2017 the XMOS VocalFusion 4-Mic Dev Kit for Amazon AVS was qualified by Amazon.
In February 2018 the VocalFusion Stereo Dev Kit for Amazon AVS was announced at Mobile World Congress 2018, and qualified by Amazon for the Alexa Voice Service.

Digital audio

XMOS multicore microcontrollers are used extensively by multinational companies such as Audio Partnership, Cambridge Audio, FiiO Electronics Technology, Meridian Audio, Native Instruments, Oppo Digital, Sennheiser and Sony to implement USB Audio 2.0 interfaces in their products.
In December 2014, AVnu Alliance, the industry consortium driving open standards-based deterministic networking through certification, announced XMOS as the first available AVnu-certified Audio Video Bridging and Time-Sensitive Networking audio endpoint reference platform.

xCORE multicore microcontrollers

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 up to eight tasks concurrently. Tasks can communicate with each other over channels, or using memory.
The xCORE architecture delivers, in hardware, many of the elements that are usually seen in a real-time operating system. This includes the task scheduler, timers, I/O operations, and channel communication. By eliminating sources of timing uncertainty, xCORE can provide deterministic and predictable performance for many applications. A task can typically respond in nanoseconds to events such as external I/O or timers. This makes it possible to program xCORE devices to perform hard real-time tasks that would otherwise require dedicated hardware.
xCORE devices have been used in a range of different markets, including voice processing, USB Audio, AVB and Time-Sensitive Networking, industrial communications, and robotics.
xCORE devices can be programmed using C, C++, xC or native assembler. To help programmers access the real-time hardware features of xCORE devices, some multicore language extensions for C have been added. These extensions form a programming language called xC which contains features for task-based parallelism and communication, accurate timing and I/O, and safe memory management.
A tool-chain, xTIMEcomposer, comes with LLVM-based compilers for C, C++ and xC, cycle-accurate simulator, symbolic debugger, runtime instrumentation and trace libraries and a static code timing analyzer. All of the components are aware of the real-time multicore nature of the programs, giving a fully integrated approach.

Industrial and robotics

In June 2014, XMOS partnered with Synapticon, leaders in Cyber Physical Systems, to support emerging trends such as Industry 4.0 in the factory automation market and service robotics market.