Tensilica

Infobox Company
company_name = Tensilica Inc.
company_type = Private
foundation = 1997
location = Santa Clara, California, USA coord|37.385384|-121.971524
key_people = Chris Rowen
industry = Processor IP
products = Microprocessor cores
homepage = [http://www.tensilica.com www.tensilica.com]

Tensilcia is an IP core company based in Silicon Valley. Tensilica is best known for its Xtensa tool-generated microprocessor cores that are particularly configurable and able to be extended. Tensilica also offers a Diamond product line of less configurable processor and software IP for audio and video encoding and decoding.

Tensilica was founded in 1997 by former employees of several other Silicon Valley processor and EDA companies and is a privately held corporation. Tensilica's headquarters is in Santa Clara, California and the company has worldwide offices in regions with large numbers of chip designs.

Processor Cores

Tensilica develops processor technology IP for use in synthesized chip designs primarily for embedded systems. Tensilica sells licenses to its configurable, extensible Xtensa generated processor core technology, fixed Diamond processor cores, and audio and video encoding and decoding software.

Xtensa

Xtensa is Tensilica's best known product. It is a tool for generating a processor IP core. Xtensa allows a particularly wide range of options that can be configured for the generated processor. It also allows the designer a particularly wide range of means by which to extend the processor.

Whereas most computer processors vendors standardize on an instruction set that software developers and compilers can use to implement their programs, every Xtensa generated processor has a different instruction set. Xtensa generated processors are practical for software developers to program because Xtensa also generates a compiler to match the processor. Like other embedded processor vendors, Tensilica provides a unified and consistent Eclipse-based integrated development environment that allows software developers to develop application code without considering the underlying instruction set or processor architecture.

Xtensa also allows designers to add a remarkable variety of extensions to the processor, including register files, execution units, and data transfer interfaces. Extensions can include SIMD registers and operations of an arbitrary number of elements and data element size. Each Xtensa extension instruction can control any arbitrary combination of register files, execution units, and interfaces with an instruction encoding efficiently customized for the generated processor.

To ease the exploration of the relative benefits of so many possible choices of configuration options and extensions for a target software design, Tensilica provides designers with the XPRES design space exploration tool.

Diamond cores

Consistent processor architectures with limited configurability and no application specific extensions have the benefit of binary code portability. Tensilica's product line of Diamond cores were created from Xtensa but have fixed instruction set architectures to provide this benefit. Diamond cores are targeted at DSP and multimedia applications such as audio and video.

Multimedia software

Tensilica sells licenses to a range of audio encoder and decoder software that has been optimized to run on the Diamond Hifi audio processor and operate on common industry standards of digital audio compression. The company also sells licenses to a range of video encoder and decoder software that has been optimized to run on the Diamond VDO video core and operate on common industry standards of digital video compression.

History

* In 1997 Tensilica was founded by Chris Rowen and Harvey Jones
* In 2002 Tensilica released support for flexible length instruction encodings, known as FLIX
* In 2004 Tensilica released the XPRES tool for automatically exploring the range of available configuration trade-offs
* In 2006 Tensilica sold the first less-configurable Diamond core licenses
* In 2007 Tensilica sold the first Diamond VDO multiprocessor video core and software license

Company Name

The name Tensilica comes from a combination of the word "tensile", meaning capable of being extended, and the word "silicon", the element of which Integrated circuits are primarily made.

External links

* [http://www.tensilica.com/ Official site]
* [http://www.linux-xtensa.org/ Linux on Xtensa]