Bristol, 3rd February 2014 – XMOS, the leader in multicore microcontrollers has today announced the appointment of Simon Knowles to the role of Chief Technology Officer and member of the Board of Directors.
Knowles has a strong track record as both engineer and entrepreneur, having co-founded and exited two highly successful fabless semiconductor companies, Element14 Inc. and Icera Inc, for a combined value of over $1billion. He is well known as a leading microprocessor designer, responsible for ground-breaking designs at STMicro, Element14, and Icera.
Knowles brings experience of managing large global teams and delivering innovation, with a focus on customer needs and product quality. This appointment is effective immediately and will report to Nigel Toon, XMOS Chief Executive Officer.
“Simon has extensive expertise, gained from an extremely successful career as entrepreneur and technologist developing advanced semiconductor products. I am delighted to have Simon join our executive team,” said Nigel Toon . “ As CTO, Simon will be responsible for defining the future generation of XMOS multicore microcontroller products, driving our silicon development activities, as well as collaborating with customers and the academic community on the next generation of applications for our products, which include real-time communications, sensor fusion, autonomous vehicles, driver assistance, robotics, smart vision and embedded machine learning.”
Commenting on his new role, Simon Knowles said: “Embedded systems are becoming much more sophisticated and will require much higher levels of compute. Applications such as robotics, machine vision, and natural language interfaces will drive innovation in processor architecture and energy efficiency for decades. These applications will require embedded machine learning and the impact on society will be profound. XMOS is perfectly poised to build a leadership position in these new growth markets, with its unique distributed, deterministic compute platform, deep existing customer engagements, and strong financial backing.
“I am delighted to join Nigel and the XMOS team to help evolve the technology and grow XMOS into a large, independent, and even-more widely respected semiconductor business.“
Professor David May, of the Computer Science Department at Bristol University, and the original founding CTO of XMOS, will continue to act as a consultant and advisor to the company.
About XMOS
XMOS is an innovative fabless semiconductor company with its headquarters and development activities in Bristol, UK and additional development facilities in Chennai, India. The company’s wide range of configurable xCORE® multicore microcontrollers allow engineers to create the exact hardware system that they need for their application all in software, delivering the next wave in high performance, real-time, programmable system-on-chip solutions. This makes xCORE multicore microcontrollers ideal for demanding embedded applications in audio, automotive, consumer and industrial products, where other microcontrollers struggle. XMOS provides xTIMEcomposer™ Studio, an easy to use development system that makes it simple to design complex embedded systems all in software.