How to connect XMOS chip to other non-XMOS chips?

Technical discussions around xCORE processors (e.g. xcore-200 & xcore.ai).
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knighthu1982
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How to connect XMOS chip to other non-XMOS chips?

Post by knighthu1982 »

Hello,
We plan to use XMOS to act as the industry interface to connect to fieldbus and do some protocal process and motion control. Also want to choose an powerful DSP or ARM to act as the main controller and do the motion planning.
My question is : to achieve a high speed communication between these two processor(XMOS and non-XMOS), Which kind of local bus can be used? Is there any example or code?
Thank you !!


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Bianco
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Post by Bianco »

What kind of speeds are you talking about?

What kind of interface is the best largely depends on what is available on the other processor and whether this can be efficiently implemented on a XMOS chip.

Quad-SPI at 50 MHz is 200mbit/s.

If the other processor has an EBI (external bus interface), you may opt that, however this may require quite some pins.
knighthu1982
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Post by knighthu1982 »

Bianco wrote:What kind of speeds are you talking about?

What kind of interface is the best largely depends on what is available on the other processor and whether this can be efficiently implemented on a XMOS chip.

Quad-SPI at 50 MHz is 200mbit/s.

If the other processor has an EBI (external bus interface), you may opt that, however this may require quite some pins.
Hello Binaco,
Thank you for your quick reply!
Actrually, we use TI DSPs at many time. It always have EBI and some of them have QSSI which I think is what you mentioned as Q-SPI. But the EBI is not programmable and its time sequense is fixed. If I want to interface with EBI bus, Which kind of xSoftIP should I use?
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Folknology
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Post by Folknology »

Not sure if there is any existing softip for EBI, but I would imagine Xmos themselves are doing exactly this with the new xCore-XA series chips in order to get low overhead communication between the Gecko and XS1 probably using the 32bit port. Can anyone at Xmos confirm this , will there be any softip for this approach?

Your other alternative perhaps, is if you have an ARM/FPGA (Zinq or some such) is to implement Xmos links in the fabric.

regards
Al
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