XMOS Doubles Real-Time Performance Of USB-Equipped MCUs
Three USB-equipped multicore MCUs have joined the xCORE family from XMOS. The U10-128, U12-128, and U16-128 provide 10, 12, and 16 logical cores respectively and deliver up to 1000 MIPS of deterministic parallel compute, along with 128 kbytes of on-chip RAM. The devices incorporate a High Speed USB 2.0 physical layer (PHY) and can support 480-Mbit/s data-rates and USB Audio Class 2. The xCORE-USB device family, then, can address a range of demanding applications including high-performance peripherals, audiophile consumer audio, sound bars, multi-channel USB audio interfaces, DJ products, USB speakers, and protocol conversion plus bridging. Other features include a multichannel 12-bit, 1-Msample/s analog-to-digital converter (ADC), standby and deep sleep modes for energy-sensitive applications, power on reset, a watchdog timer, brownout detection, and integrated oscillator circuits. The xCORE architecture uses a 32-bit multicore technology with hardware response to deliver deterministic performance and complete I/O flexibility with a simple high-level C programming environment. The low latency and determinism of the architecture allows even demanding time-critical functions such as interfacing and media delivery to be addressed in software, with hardware levels of response.