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Tensilica Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Semiconductor intellectual property core
Founded	1997
Fate	Acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 2013
Headquarters	San Jose, California
Key people	Chris Rowen, Jack Guedj
Products	Microprocessors, HiFi audio, DSP cores
Website	ip.cadence.com

Tensilica Inc. was a company based in Silicon Valley that developed semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) cores. Tensilica was founded in 1997 by Chris Rowen. In April 2013, the company was acquired by Cadence Design Systems for approximately $326 million.

Products

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Cadence Tensilica develops SIP blocks to be included on the chip (IC) designs of products of their licensees, such as system on a chip for embedded systems. Tensilica processors are delivered as synthesizable RTL to aid integration with other chips.

Xtensa configurable cores

Xtensa processors range from small, low-power cache-less microcontroller to more performance-oriented SIMD processors, multiple-issue VLIW DSP cores, and neural network processors. Cadence standard DSPs are based on the Xtensa architecture. The architecture offers a user-customizable instruction set through automated customization tools that can extend the base instruction set, including and not limited to, addition of new SIMD instructions and register files.

Xtensa instruction set

The Xtensa instruction set is a 32-bit architecture with a compact 16- and 24-bit instruction set. The base instruction set has 82 RISC instructions and includes a 32-bit ALU, 16 general-purpose 32-bit registers, and one special-purpose register.

Audio and voice DSP IP

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• 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.
• HiFi 5 DSP - For digital assistants, infotainment, and voice-controlled products.

Vision DSPs

• Vision P5 and P6 DSP.
• Vision C5 DSP, for neural network computational tasks.

Adoption

• AMD TrueAudio, available in select GPU products based on the GCN2 microarchitecture, integrates an HiFi EP Audio DSP on-die. Hardware integration of the DSP is dropped since GCN4, with TrueAudio Next switching to a GPGPU-based approach.
• Microsoft HoloLens incorporates a custom coprocessor fabricated on TSMC's 28nm process node, integrating 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has around 65 million logic gates, 8 MB of SRAM, and 1 GB of low-power DDR3 RAM.
• Espressif ESP8266 and ESP32 Wi-Fi IoT SoCs use respectively the "Diamond Standard 106Micro" (by Espressif referred to as "L106") and the LX6.
• Spreadtrum, licensing the HiFi DSP.
• VIA Technologies, using the HiFi DSP in an embedded SoC.
• Realtek standardized on the HiFi audio DSP for mobile and PC products.

History

• In 1997, Tensilica was founded by Chris Rowen.
• Five years later, Tensilica released support for flexible length instruction encodings, known as FLIX.
• By 2013, Cadence Design Systems acquired 100% of Tensilica.

Company name

The brand name Tensilica is a combination of the word Tensile and Silica, with the latter referring to silicon, the building blocks of modern integrated circuits.

References

1. "S-1 Supercomputer Alumni". Retrieved 2019-02-22. Most recently he was chief architect at Tensilica working on configurable/extensible processors.
2. Source: http://ip.cadence.com/news/432/330/Cadence-Reports-First-Quarter-2013-Financial-Results-and-Completes-Acquisition-of-Tensilica
3. "Cadence DSP Targets Neural Network Development". EE Times. 2016-05-02. Retrieved 2024-12-28.
4. Emilio, Maurizio Di Paolo (2021-07-21). "New Cadence Tensilica DSP supports floating point for optimum PPA". Embedded. Retrieved 2024-12-28.
5. https://0x04.net/~mwk/doc/xtensa.pdf §1.2.2
6. Ingole, Anirudh (2019). Instruction Set Design for Elementary Set in Tensilica Xtensa. 10th International Conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT). doi:10.1109/ICCCNT45670.2019.8944687.
7. https://0x04.net/~mwk/doc/xtensa.pdf Chapter 3 "Core Architecture"
8. "Tensilica Introduces the Smallest, Lowest Power DSP IP Core For Always-Listening Voice Trigger and Voice Recognition". design-reuse.com. Retrieved 2024-03-05.
9. "Tensilica HiFi 2 Audio DSP Supports HE AAC by Dolby in Digital Radio Mondiale; Now Offers Decoders for All Major International Digital Radio Standards". design-reuse.com. Retrieved 2024-03-05.
10. "Tensilica Introduces HiFi EP DSP Core for High Quality Audio in Home Entertainment and Smartphone Applications". design-reuse.com. Retrieved 2024-03-05.
11. "Tensilica's HiFi 3 DSP IP Core Provides Over 1.5x Better Performance for Audio Post Processing and Voice in Smartphones and Home Entertainment". 2012-01-11. Retrieved 2024-03-05.
12. "Tensilica HiFi 3z DSP IP Core Provides Enhanced Voice and Audio Processing". circuitcellar.com. 2017-07-28. Retrieved 2024-03-05.
13. "Cadence Announces Fourth Generation Tensilica HiFi DSP Architecture". prnewswire.com. 2015-01-06. Retrieved 2024-03-05.
14. "HiFi 5 DSP". cadence.com. Cadence. Retrieved 4 October 2023.
15. "New Cadence Tensilica Vision P5 DSP Enables 4K Mobile Imaging with 13X Performance Boost and 5X Lower Energy".
16. "Cadence Announces New Tensilica Vision P6 DSP Targeting Embedded Neural Network Applications".
17. "Cadence Unveils Industry's First Neural Network DSP IP for Automotive, Surveillance, Drone and Mobile Markets".
18. "Everything You Wanted to Know About AMD TrueAudio". Maximum PC. 2013-10-08. Archived from the original on July 11, 2014. Retrieved 2014-07-06.
19. "TrueAudio Next". AMD GPUOpen. Retrieved 2024-11-11.
20. "Microsoft's HoloLens secret sauce: A 28nm customized 24-core DSP engine built by TSMC". The Register.
21. "ESP8266EX Datasheet" (PDF). October 2020. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
22. "ESP32 SeriesDatasheet" (PDF). 2021-03-19. Retrieved 2021-03-23.
23. "Spreadtrum Licenses Tensilica HiFi Audio/Voice DSP".
24. "Customer Spotlight: VIA Technologies Licenses Cadence Tensilica HiFi Audio/Voice DSP".
25. "Realtek Licenses Cadence's Tensilica HiFi Audio/Voice DSP IP Core".

External links

• Official website

• Companies based in Silicon Valley
• Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
• Embedded microprocessors
• Digital signal processors
• Fabless semiconductor companies
• Companies established in 1997
• Defunct computer companies of the United States
• Defunct computer hardware companies