Tensilica
Encyclopedia
Tensilica is an IP core
company based in Silicon Valley
. Tensilica is best known for its customizable microprocessor
cores, the Xtensa configurable processor. Other products include standard controllers (Diamond series), audio/video coding software libraries for Tensilica processor cores, and standalone (application-specific) hardware cores for audio/video codecs, such as MPEG audio/video.
Tensilica was founded in 1997 by former employees of several other Silicon Valley processor and EDA
companies such as MIPS
, and employed Earl Killian as chief software architect for several years. It 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.
Using the supplied customization tools, customers can extend the Xtensa base instruction-set by adding new user-defined instructions. Extensions can include SIMD
instructions, new register files, and additional data transfer interfaces for multiprocessor communication. After the final processor configuration is made and submitted, Tensilica's processor generator service builds the configured Xtensa IP core, processor design kit, and software development kit.
The processor kit contains items necessary to integrate the configured IP into the customer's chip design environment: the core's hardware description (in synthesizeable RTL or physical postlayout form), timing & I/O constraints, requirements for technology-specific RAMs/caches/fifos. The software kit is built on the Eclipse
-based integrated development environment
, and uses a GNU derived tool-chain: C/C++ compiler
, assembler, linker, debugger. An instruction set simulator enables customers to begin application development before actual hardware is available.
To help customers study the design tradeoffs inherent in different processor configurations, Tensilica provides designers with the XPRES design space exploration tool. For a particular target application, XPRES enables customers to estimate many performance characteristics, such as execution throughput, cache/memory utilization, and power consumption.
s are primarily made.
Semiconductor intellectual property core
In electronic design a semiconductor intellectual property core, IP core, or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or chip layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores may be licensed to another party or can be owned and used by a single party alone...
company based in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
. Tensilica is best known for its customizable microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
cores, the Xtensa configurable processor. Other products include standard controllers (Diamond series), audio/video coding software libraries for Tensilica processor cores, and standalone (application-specific) hardware cores for audio/video codecs, such as MPEG audio/video.
Tensilica was founded in 1997 by former employees of several other Silicon Valley processor and EDA
Electronic design automation
Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuits...
companies such as MIPS
MIPS architecture
MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...
, and employed Earl Killian as chief software architect for several years. It is a privately held corporation. Tensilica's headquarters is in Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara , founded in 1777 and incorporated in 1852, is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city is the site of the eighth of 21 California missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and was named after the mission. The Mission and Mission Gardens are located on the...
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 Configurable Cores
Xtensa is Tensilica's best known processor IP architecture. IP vendors of embedded processor architectures typically offer the user choices in many of the IP core's implementation details: cache size, processor bus width, data and instruction RAMs, memory management and interrupt control. However, Tensilica's Xtensa architecture offers a key differentiating feature, a user-customizable instruction set.Using the supplied customization tools, customers can extend the Xtensa base instruction-set by adding new user-defined instructions. Extensions can include SIMD
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data , is a class of parallel computers in Flynn's taxonomy. It describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data simultaneously...
instructions, new register files, and additional data transfer interfaces for multiprocessor communication. After the final processor configuration is made and submitted, Tensilica's processor generator service builds the configured Xtensa IP core, processor design kit, and software development kit.
The processor kit contains items necessary to integrate the configured IP into the customer's chip design environment: the core's hardware description (in synthesizeable RTL or physical postlayout form), timing & I/O constraints, requirements for technology-specific RAMs/caches/fifos. The software kit is built on the Eclipse
Eclipse (software)
Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment and an extensible plug-in system...
-based integrated development environment
Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...
, and uses a GNU derived tool-chain: C/C++ compiler
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
, assembler, linker, debugger. An instruction set simulator enables customers to begin application development before actual hardware is available.
To help customers study the design tradeoffs inherent in different processor configurations, Tensilica provides designers with the XPRES design space exploration tool. For a particular target application, XPRES enables customers to estimate many performance characteristics, such as execution throughput, cache/memory utilization, and power consumption.
Diamond standard controllers
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 multiprocessorMultiprocessorComputer system having two or more processing units each sharing main memory and peripherals, in order to simultaneously process programs.Sometimes the term Multiprocessor is confused with the term Multiprocessing....
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 circuitIntegrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
s are primarily made.