FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, European Editor Dick Selwood is on the scene with XMOS, who is debuting a new technology called "Software Defined Silicon". Mr Selwood
says:
"Move over SoCs, ASICs, ASSPs and FPGAs, there is a new acronym on the
block: SDS. If the inventors deliver on the claims, then Software Designed Silicon will give consumer electronics designers the power and cost advantages of an SoC, the flexibility of an FPGA and ease of design like nothing else. And if you have read the discussion of parallel processing by Ian Barron (read it here) much of the approach will ring bells."
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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Software Defined Silicon
The Route to Consumer Electronics?
Move over SoCs, ASICs, ASSPs and FPGAs, there is a new acronym on the block: SDS. If the inventors deliver on the claims, then Software Designed Silicon will give consumer electronics designers the power and cost advantages of an SoC, the flexibility of an FPGA, and ease of design like nothing else. And if you have read the discussion of parallel processing by Iann Barron (READ IT HERE), much of the approach will ring bells.
University Gate is a modern office block in the centre of the West of England city of Bristol, which bridges academe and the commercial world. On one side it faces a slightly grubby and bustling street, and on the other it links directly with the Computer Science Department building of Bristol University. Many of the companies that operate in University Gate are start-ups, and XMOS, the company behind Software Defined Silicon (SDS), is the epitome of university research passing into the commercial world, with David May, Professor of Computer Science, as the company’s CTO.
The basic idea of SDS is simple: define everything that you can for your system in software, including much that is traditionally implemented in hardware, and then run the result on an array of processors. Each task is a thread, and each processor executes a single thread, with no interrupts. [more]
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