XMOS is a company focused on designing audio MCUs, but Huawei, Bosch, and Xilinx made strategic investments in this company last year. We know that Huawei focuses on the field of communications, Bosch focuses on the field of sensors, and Xilinx products are mainly FPGAs. So why did these three companies invest in a company focused on audio MCU design? What are the company's product advantages? In addition, XMOS MCU is also suitable for industrial control and real-time communication, so what is the relationship between the audio player and the robot and communication?
Hi-Fi player can also achieve affordable pricesLet's first take a look at several audiophile-level audio players and amp products. The first is the desktop Hi-Fi network music player AK500N launched by Korea Avery and the company, which is priced at US $ 14,000. It supports playback of up to 384kHz 32-bit PCM / DSD music files. The second one is Avery's music player AK240, priced at 2500 US dollars, it also supports playback of up to 384kHz 32-bit PCM / DSD music files.
Figure 1: The price of South Korea's Avery and the company's desktop Hi-Fi network music player AK500N reached US $ 14,000.
Let's look at the third product-OPPO's HA2 amp, which is also a high-level 384kHz / 32-bit PCM audio decoder. It supports VOOC flash charging technology, and can also be used as a mobile power supply, the price is only 1998 yuan RMB.
Figure 2: The OPPO HA2 amp is only priced at RMB 1998, and its performance is comparable to Sony products.
XMOS China sales manager Zhang Shaoxiong told reporters at a recent media conference that OPPO's product, priced less than 2,000 yuan, can be compared with Sony's five or six thousand similar products. What are the similarities of these products? They use XMOS xCORE MCU solution.
Why can xCORE-200 MCU achieve the universal audio and industrial control?XMOS recently launched its second generation MCU product line: xCORE-200 MCU chip and xCORE-AUDIO SoC chip. Zhang Shaoxiong said that xCORE-200 is a general-purpose multi-core MCU, and xCORE-AUDIO is a SoC based on xCORE-200. The physical layer of xCORE-AUDIO is the same as that of xCORE-200, and the software is made into SoC according to industry application. xCORE is as flexible as FPGA, and can be rapidly formed and mass-produced through C / C ++ programming. Some domestic manufacturers use FPGA for prototyping, which is very troublesome, and xCORE-AUDIO is very fast to implement.
Compared with the previous generation chip, xCORE-200 has three major differences: higher performance, the speed of the previous series is up to 2GHz, and the speed of xCORE-200 is up to 4GHz; more memory, from the previous maximum 512kB to the current 1MB; more flexible I / O.
xCORE-200 is compatible with previous xCORE codes and can be easily ported. xCORE-200 is easier to use-the new tool interface has been optimized and compilation efficiency has been improved. In addition, it provides more IP libraries to customers, which can quickly realize the design.
The xCORE-200 doubles its performance because it can run two instructions in one clock cycle (through the instruction pipeline).
xCORE-200 includes three series: XE2xx (Gigabit Ethernet + USB series), XU2xx (USB series) and XL2xx (flexible multi-core series). XE2xx is relatively high-end, with Gigabit Ethernet and 2 USBs, with a minimum of 16 cores. XU2xx covers 8 ~ 32 cores. The XL2xx only has up to 16 cores. All three series can provide TQFP package, which is convenient for soldering iron, and the previous product package is BGA, which is not convenient for debugging.
Figure 3: The complete product set of the three series of xCORE-200.
Figure 3 shows the evaluation board eXplorerKIT of xCORE-200. It provides 1 Gigabit Ethernet network port and 2 USB 2.0 ports. The xCORE-200 chip on it uses XE216-512-TQ128 (XE series, 16 cores, 512KB SRAM, 128-pin TQFP package) with a rate of up to 2000MIPS. In addition, it has 53 available Hardware Response IO ports, with 3D accelerometer and magnetometer, and 6 servo interfaces.
Figure 4: xCORE-200 evaluation board eXplorerKIT.
What are the promising applications of xCORE-200?Zhang Shaoxiong pointed out that the promising applications of xCORE-200 include the following aspects. The first is high-speed real-time data collection, because there is Gigabit Ethernet and flexible IO interface, which requires more serial ports, CAN, Ethernet or USB, which can be realized quickly. Real-time and high-speed Ethernet and USB are the advantages of xCORE-200.
Figure 5: XMOS China Sales Manager Zhang Shaoxiong introduced the advantages of xCORE-200.
The second is service robots. Except in the field of industrial automation, more robots are used for home services. A customer of XMOS has designed a take-out robot with wheels. The domestic food delivery robot needs to lay rails, but it does not need it (xCORE is suitable for multi-axis control and real-time communication). In addition, it can move around freely, and can remember the location, avoid obstacles and draw maps.
The third is IoT. Connection transfer, for example, cars need to bridge CAN and Ethernet (connect car status to big data through car networking), xCORE can implement different protocols (such as CAN, Ethernet and cloud, Note: Cloud usually uses mobile communication module connection This type of module is generally converted between USB connections. In addition, the car also has the need to transmit audio and video in real time with Ethernet, and it can also be extended to industrial / security and other fields.
The fourth is a time-sensitive network.
The fifth is intelligent control and high-performance human-machine interface. For example, gesture recognition can be achieved with a multi-channel xCORE-Audio board. The principle of audio and ultrasound is the same, and its accuracy and real-time are much better than infrared.
In addition, xCORE-200 provides the corresponding tool suite xTIMEcomposer, including the free design version and the enterprise version. The enterprise version provides on-site support guarantee (XMOS engineers respond to customer questions within a certain time), and the price is $ 4995 / year. The design effect is the same, mainly for large customers like Honeywell and Schneider.
xCORE-AUDIO SoC provides Turn-Key solution
The xCORE-AUDIO SoC is essentially a xCORE-200 chip, and its design is mainly aimed at HiFi-level high sampling rate solutions, DSP real-time audio processing input and output, USB Audio and AVB standard applications. It focuses on lowering prices for consumer applications, such as karaoke, conferences and other products.
xCORE-AUDIO includes xCORE-AUDIO / Hi-Res and xCORE-AUDIO / Live two series, supports all platforms such as Android, iOS and Windows. xCORE-AUDIO / Hi-Res supports very high resolution, sampling rate from 44kHz to 384kHz, resolution accuracy from 16 to 32 bits, the format is PCM / DSD. The number of channels includes 5.1 and 7.1 channels, and the output channels include Analog, I2S, SPDIF, and DSD / DoP. Input channels include USB and SPDIF. DSP includes surround sound and karaoke, and other DSPs will be added in the future. At the same time, it also supports the latest USB Type C interface. The development board uses ESS DAC to ensure the quality of audio output.
Figure 6: Performance overview of xCORE-AUDIO / Hi-Res and xCORE-AUDIO / Live series.
Zhang Shaoxiong said that xCORE-200 performance is very good, even stronger than the ARM Cortex-M7 MCU. At the same time, it provides development kits and free development tools. In addition, xCORE-200 is also very suitable for multi-axis motion control and real-time communication. xCORE-AUDIO is aimed at group purchase customers, and can help customers quickly bring their designs to market.
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Yuheng Optics Co., Ltd.(Changchun) , https://www.yhenoptics.com