Tensilica

Tensilica Inc. was a company based in Silicon Valley in the semiconductor intellectual property core business. It is now a part of Cadence Design Systems. Tensilica is known for its customizable Xtensa microprocessor core. Other products include: HiFi audio/voice DSPs (digital signal processors) with a software library of over 225 codecs 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 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). It employed Earl Killian, who contributed to the MIPS architecture, as director of architecture. On March 11, 2013, Cadence Design Systems 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 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 for easy integration into chip designs. Xtensa processors range from small, low-power cache-less microcontroller to high-performance 16-way SIMD processors, 3-issue VLIW 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 through automated customization tools that can extend the Xtensa base instruction set, including SIMD instructions, new register files. 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.