World’s most comprehensive range of multicore microcontrollers allows engineers to choose number of cores, memory size, compute and price point.
XMOS announces a significant extension in its range of general-purpose multicore microcontrollers, the L Series. The company is adding 6-, 10- and 12-core variants, plus new memory size options to the existing 8- and 16-core products in its xCORE family, which now includes over 50 devices, the world’s broadest range of multicore microcontrollers.
With the new introductions XMOS delivers a range of solutions that is perfectly scaled to customers’ requirements in terms of capability, price and performance. The new products join the recently announced xCORE-USB devices, and existing members of the general purpose L series (formerly known as L1 and L2). The L-series now consists of:
- The 6-core XS1-L6-64,
- The 8-core XS1-L8-64,
- The 8-core, 1000MIPS XS1-L8-128 with extended memory,
- The 10-core XS1-L10-128,
- The 12-core XS1-L12-128,
- The 16-core XS1-L16-128.
Individual products are available in a variety of package and performance options as well as commercial and industrial variants.
The new L8-128 integrates 128 Kbytes of on-chip RAM and delivers enhanced performance, with each of the eight logical cores able to deliver up to 125MIPS of computing power. The introduction of 10- and 12-core options provides xCORE users with more flexibility than ever in balancing the price and performance requirements of their products. The entire L-Series is organized into two pin-compatible groups, allowing designers to build multiple end-product variants using a single hardware platform.
The new L-Series multicore microcontrollers are enabled by an evolution of the fundamental xCORE technology, which is based on powerful deterministic processor ‘tiles’, each of which is optimized to support a number of logical cores. For example, the XS1-L10-128 has two tiles, each of which provides five logical cores, giving a total of 10 logical cores in the device. An on-chip network connects the separate tiles and logical cores together, and the operation of the device is controlled by a hardware scheduler that ensures deterministic processing at all times.
The XS1-L8-64 and XS1-L16-128 are available now. The new L-Series parts are available in February 2013, with prices starting at $4.67 in volume.
