Tensilica was a company based in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Cou ...

in the

semiconductor intellectual property core In electronic design, a semiconductor intellectual property core (SIP core), IP core, or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or integrated circuit layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores can be licensed t ...

business. It is now a part of

Cadence Design Systems Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (stylized as cādence), headquartered in San Jose, California, is an American multinational computational software company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. The company produces software, ...

. Tensilica is known for its customizable Xtensa

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

core. Other products include: HiFi audio/voice DSPs (

digital signal processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on MOS integrated circuit chips. They are widely used in audio s ...

s) with a software library of over 225

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or ...

s from Cadence and over 100 software partners; Vision DSPs that handle complex algorithms in imaging, video, computer vision, and neural networks; and the ConnX family of

baseband In telecommunications and signal processing, baseband is the range of frequencies occupied by a signal that has not been modulated to higher frequencies. Baseband signals typically originate from transducers, converting some other variable i ...

DSPs ranging from the dual- MAC ConnX D2 to the 64-MAC ConnX BBE64EP. Tensilica was founded in 1997 by Chris Rowen (one of the founders of

MIPS Technologies MIPS Technologies, Inc., formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., was an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides pro ...

). It employed Earl Killian, who contributed to the

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

, as director of architecture. On March 11, 2013,

announced its intent to buy Tensilica for approximately $380 million in cash. Cadence completed the acquisition in April 2013, with a cash outlay at closing of approximately $326 million.

Cadence Tensilica products

Cadence Tensilica develops SIP blocks to be included on the chip (IC) designs of products of their licensees, such as

system on a chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memor ...

for

embedded systems An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' ...

. Tensilica processors are delivered as synthesizable RTL for easy integration into chip designs.

Xtensa configurable cores

Xtensa processors range from small, low-power cache-less

microcontroller A microcontroller (MCU for ''microcontroller unit'', often also MC, UC, or μC) is a small computer on a single VLSI integrated circuit (IC) chip. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs ( processor cores) along with memory and programmabl ...

to high-performance 16-way

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it shoul ...

processors, 3-issue

VLIW Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to instruction set architectures designed to exploit instruction level parallelism (ILP). Whereas conventional central processing units (CPU, processor) mostly allow programs to specify instructions to exe ...

DSP cores, or 1 TMAC/sec neural network processors. All Cadence standard DSPs are based on the Xtensa architecture. The Xtensa architecture offers a user-customizable

instruction set In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ...

through automated customization tools that can extend the Xtensa base instruction set, including

instructions, new register files.

Xtensa instruction set

The Xtensa

is a 32-bit architecture with a compact 16- and 24-bit instruction set. The base instruction set has 82

RISC In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set comp ...

instructions and includes a 32-bit ALU, 16 general-purpose 32-bit registers, and one special-purpose register. * Xtensa LX — sixth-generation architecture, announced in May 2004 * Xtensa V — fifth-generation architecture, announced in August 2002; up to 350 MHz in a 130 nm process * Xtensa IV — fourth-generation product, announced in June 2001; ho-hum, mostly with more tooling support * Xtensa III — third-generation architecture, announced in June 2000; not less than 180 MHz in a 180 nm process

HiFi audio and voice DSP IP

* HiFi Mini Audio DSP — A small low power DSP core for voice triggering and voice recognition * HiFi 2 Audio DSP — DSP core for low power MP3 audio processing * HiFi EP Audio DSP — A superset of HiFi 2 with optimizations for DTS Master Audio, voice pre- and post-processing, and cache management * HiFi 3 Audio DSP — 32-bit DSP for audio enhancement algorithms, wideband voice codecs, and multi-channel audio * HiFi 3z Audio DSP — For lower-powered audio, wideband voice codecs, and neural-network-based speech recognition. * HiFi 4 DSP - Higher performance DSP for applications such as multi-channel object-based audio standards.

Vision DSPs

* Vision P5 DSP. * Vision P6 DSP, with 4X the peak performance of the Vision P5 DSP. * Vision C5 DSP, for neural network computational tasks.

Adoption

AMD TrueAudio TrueAudio is the name given to AMD's ASIC intended to serve as dedicated co-processor for the calculations of computationally expensive advanced audio signal processing, like e.g. convolution reverberation effects and 3D audio effects. TrueAudi ...

, found e.g. in the

PlayStation 4 The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 in February 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013, in North America, November 29, 2013 i ...

, in "Kaveri" desktop APUs and in a very few of AMD's graphics cards, is based on the Cadence Tensilica HiFi EP Audio DSP. * Microsoft HoloLens uses special custom-designed TSMC-fabricated 28 nm coprocessor that has 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has around 65 million logic gates, 8 MB of SRAM, and an additional layer of 1 GB of low-power DDR3 RAM. * Espressif

ESP8266 The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi microchip, with built-in TCP/IP networking software, and microcontroller capability, produced by Espressif Systems in Shanghai, China. The chip was popularized in the English-speaking maker community in Augus ...

and

ESP32 ESP32 is a series of low-cost, low-power system on a chip microcontrollers with integrated Wi-Fi and dual-mode Bluetooth. The ESP32 series employs either a Tensilica Xtensa LX6 microprocessor in both dual-core and single-core variations, Xtensa ...

Wi-Fi IoT SoCs use respectively the "Diamond Standard 106Micro" (by Espressif referred to as "L106") and the LX6 * Spreadtrum licensed the HiFi DSP for smartphones. * VIA Technologies uses a HiFi DSP in an SoC for set top box, tablets, and mobile devices. * Realtek standardized on the HiFi audio DSP for mobile and PC products.

History

* In 1997 Tensilica was founded by Chris Rowen. * In 2002 Tensilica released support for flexible length instruction encodings, known as FLIX. * In 2013

acquired Tensilica.

Company name

The brand name ''Tensilica'' is a combination of the word '' Tensile'', meaning capable of being extended, and the word Silica from ''

silicon Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic luster, and is a tetravalent metalloid and semiconductor. It is a member of group 14 in the periodic ...

'', the element of which

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

s are primarily made.

References

External links

*{{Official website, ip.cadence.com Companies based in Silicon Valley Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States Embedded microprocessors Digital signal processors Fabless semiconductor companies Companies established in 1997