Why XMOS is Relevant to You

David May, XMOS CTO and co-founder, discusses why XMOS is relevant to the academic community. David has been involved in both academic and cutting-edge commercial work on concurrency for over 30 years and has been a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bristol since 1995.

XMOS is enabling an entire generation through a fundamental industry shift.

To tackle the problem of massive growth of cost and complexity of using silicon, we are seeing a fundamental shift in the industry - towards programmable fabrics. This is the way that most electronic systems will be designed over the next five or ten years: with XMOS building the raw silicon fabric and designers customizing it in software. This is great because it puts an easy-to-use piece of technology in the hands of the student, product designer or entrepreneur. This liberates and enables a whole generation of new product designers.

XMOS provides sequential, concurrent AND event-driven programming.

A modern electronic system is highly interactive, communicating with the user, the network, various peripherals and interfaces. This challenges our current computer science education: for many years we have taught only a third of computer programming - sequential programming. We are ignoring the art of concurrency and the art of event-driven programming. If concurrency is taught at all it is usually as an optional extra - or at the end of the course. This is just wrong! It is both an essential requirement in programming new electronic products and in understanding the world: the world is a concurrent place. Computer scientists must often capture the world's concurrency in models and it is essential they have the right intellectual tools to do this.

XMOS helps you build state of the art products.

What do we want for students? To make it really easy to use our technology in projects and to explore the concurrent, event-driven world, whilst building something real. One of the most exciting developments in computing and electronics is the creative process behind the production of new consumer electronic devices like iPods and iPhones. There is no reason why students should not be building real, cutting-edge products like this. Rapid prototyping machines can be used to create the plastic boxes and now XMOS has made it possible to design the software without designing special purpose chips. The door is open. It would be a great thing to have students in universities designing state of the art consumer products - for the student, for the university, and for the future of the electronic economy.