Tensilica Inc. was a company based in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is 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 area of the Santa Clara 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 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (stylized as cādence)Investor's Business DailCEO Lip-Bu Tan Molds Troubled Cadence Into Long-Term LeaderRetrieved November 12, 2020 is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology and computational ...

for approximately $326 million.

Products

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

system on a chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or Electronics, electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with computer memory, ...

architectures for

embedded systems An embedded system is a specialized 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 em ...

. Tensilica processors are delivered as synthesizable RTL to aid integration with other designs.

Xtensa configurable cores

Xtensa processors range from small, low-power

cache Cache, caching, or caché may refer to: Science and technology * Cache (computing), a technique used in computer storage for easier data access * Cache (biology) or hoarding, a food storing behavior of animals * Cache (archaeology), artifacts p ...

-less

microcontroller A microcontroller (MC, uC, or μC) or microcontroller unit (MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs (processor cores) along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Pro ...

to more performance-oriented

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel computer, parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneousl ...

processors, multiple-issue

VLIW Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to instruction set architectures that are designed to exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). A VLIW processor allows programs to explicitly specify instructions to execute in parallel computing, para ...

DSP cores, and neural network processors. Cadence standard DSPs are based on the Xtensa

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...

. The architecture offers a user-customizable

instruction set In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model that generally defines how software controls the CPU in a computer or a family of computers. A device or program that executes instructions described by that ISA, s ...

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

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

RISC In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a comp ...

instructions and includes a 32-bit ALU, 16 general-purpose 32-bit registers, and one special-purpose register.

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 Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

. * 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 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

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 General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

-based approach. *

Microsoft HoloLens Microsoft HoloLens is an augmented reality (AR)/ mixed reality (MR) headset developed and manufactured by Microsoft. HoloLens runs the Windows Mixed Reality platform under the Windows 10 operating system. Some of the positional tracking tech ...

incorporates a custom

coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography or ...

fabricated on

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...

's 28nm process node, integrating 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has around 65 million

logic gates A logic gate is a device that performs a Boolean function, a logical operation performed on one or more Binary number, binary inputs that produces a single binary output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one ...

, 8 MB of SRAM, and 1 GB of low-power DDR3

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

. * Espressif

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

and

ESP32 ESP32 is a family of low-cost, energy-efficient microcontrollers that integrate both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities. These chips feature a variety of processing options, including the Tensilica Xtensa LX6 microprocessor available in both dual-c ...

Wi-Fi IoT

SoCs SOCS (suppressor of cytokine signaling proteins) refers to a family of genes involved in inhibiting the JAK-STAT signaling pathway. Genes * CISH (gene), CISH * SOCS1 * SOCS2 * SOCS3 * SOCS4 * SOCS5 * SOCS6 * SOCS7 Structure All SOCS have certai ...

use respectively the "Diamond Standard 106Micro" (by Espressif referred to as "L106") and the LX6. * Spreadtrum, licensing the HiFi DSP. *

VIA Technologies VIA Technologies, Inc. () is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory. It was once the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, ...

, using the HiFi DSP in an embedded SoC. *

Realtek Realtek Semiconductor Corp. () is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company situated in the Hsinchu Science Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan. Realtek was founded in October 1987 and subsequently listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 1998. Realtek has manu ...

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,

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 Silicon is a chemical element; it has symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic lustre, and is a tetravalent metalloid (sometimes considered a non-metal) and semiconductor. It is a membe ...

, the building blocks of modern integrated circuits.

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 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies