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Company type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Semiconductor intellectual property core |
Founded | 1997 |
Fate | Acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 2013 |
Headquarters | San Jose, California |
Key people | Chris Rowen, Jack Guedj |
Products | Microprocessors, HiFi audio, DSP cores |
Website | ip |
Tensilica Inc. was a company based in Silicon Valley that developed semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) cores. Tensilica was founded in 1997 by Chris Rowen. [1] In April 2013, the company was acquired by Cadence Design Systems for approximately $326 million. [2]
Cadence Tensilica develops SIP blocks to be included in chip (IC) designs of products of their licensees, such as system on a chip architectures for embedded systems. Tensilica processors are delivered as synthesizable RTL to aid integration with other designs.
Xtensa processors range from small, low-power cache-less microcontroller to more performance-oriented SIMD processors, multiple-issue VLIW DSP cores, and neural network processors. [3] Cadence standard DSPs are based on the Xtensa architecture. [4] The architecture offers a user-customizable instruction set through automated customization tools that can extend the base instruction set, including and not limited to, addition of new SIMD instructions and register files. [5] [6]
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. [7]
The brand name Tensilica is a combination of the word Tensile and Silica, with the latter referring to silicon, the building blocks of modern integrated circuits.[ citation needed ]
Most recently he was chief architect at Tensilica working on configurable/extensible processors.