Tensilica

Tensilica Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Semiconductor intellectual property
Founded	1997
Founder	Chris Rowen
Fate	Acquired by Cadence Design Systems
Successor	Cadence Design Systems
Headquarters	Silicon Valley , United States
Products	Semiconductor intellectual property cores, configurable processors, DSP IP blocks
Parent	Cadence Design Systems

Tensilica Inc. was a Silicon Valley-based enterprise focused on developing semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) cores. Established in 1997 by Chris Rowen, the company was purchased by Cadence Design Systems in April 2013 for around $326 million.

Products

Cadence Tensilica offers SIP blocks intended for incorporation into chip (IC) designs, including system on a chip solutions for embedded systems. Their processors are delivered as synthesizable RTL code to streamline integration within various designs.

Xtensa configurable cores

The Xtensa processor lineup ranges from energy-efficient, cache-free microcontroller models to advanced SIMD processors, multiple-issue VLIW DSP cores, as well as neural network processors. The Xtensa architecture also serves as the foundation for Cadence’s standard DSP offerings. This platform allows customization of the instruction set through automated tools, enabling the addition of new SIMD commands and extra register files.

Xtensa instruction set

The Xtensa instruction set features a 32-bit architecture with a compact instruction format that includes 16- and 24-bit instructions. Its core comprises 82 RISC instructions, a 32-bit ALU, sixteen general-purpose 32-bit registers, and one special-purpose register.

Audio and voice DSP IP

• HiFi Mini Audio DSP — A low-power DSP core tailored for voice activation and recognition tasks.
• HiFi 2 Audio DSP — Designed to efficiently handle low-power MP3 audio processing.
• HiFi EP Audio DSP — An improved variant of HiFi 2 with enhancements for DTS Master Audio support, voice pre/post-processing, and cache optimization.
• HiFi 3 Audio DSP — A 32-bit DSP capable of supporting audio enhancement algorithms, wideband voice codecs, and multi-channel audio processing.
• HiFi 3z Audio DSP — Focused on lower power consumption audio applications, wideband voice codecs, and speech recognition utilizing neural networks.
• HiFi 4 DSP — A higher-performance DSP targeting multi-channel object-based audio standards.
• HiFi 5 DSP — Engineered for digital assistant functionalities, infotainment systems, and voice-controlled gadgets.

Vision DSPs

• Vision P5 and P6 DSPs.
• Vision C5 DSP — Specialized for neural network computations.

Adoption

• Certain GPU models built on the GCN2 microarchitecture by AMD incorporated an on-chip HiFi EP Audio DSP under the TrueAudio branding. However, starting from GCN4, hardware integration was halted, with TrueAudio Next transitioning to a GPGPU-centric implementation.
• The Microsoft HoloLens utilizes a specialized coprocessor manufactured using TSMC's 28nm process node, which integrates 24 Tensilica DSP cores along with 8 MB of SRAM and 1 GB of low-power DDR3 memory.
• The Wi-Fi IoT System-on-Chips ESP8266 and ESP32 from Espressif employ the "Diamond Standard 106Micro" ("L106") DSP and the LX6 DSP respectively.
• The HiFi DSP technology is licensed by UNISOC (formerly Spreadtrum).
• Embedded SoCs from VIA Technologies incorporate the HiFi DSP as part of their design.
• Realtek has adopted the HiFi audio DSP as a standard solution for both mobile devices and personal computers.

History

• Established in 1997 by Chris Rowen, Tensilica was a pioneer in the development of configurable processor cores.
• In 2002, the company launched FLIX, a technology enabling flexible length instruction encoding.
• Tensilica became a wholly owned subsidiary of Cadence Design Systems in 2013, thereby broadening Cadence's intellectual property offerings.

Company name

The term Tensilica is derived from combining tensile and silica, symbolizing the company’s emphasis on silicon-based integrated circuit technologies.