Cadence Tensilica develops
SIP blocks to be included in
chip (IC) designs of products of its 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 configurable cores 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. Cadence standard DSPs are based on the Xtensa
architecture. 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.
Xtensa instruction set 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.
Audio and voice DSP IP • HiFi Mini Audio DSP — A small low power DSP core for voice triggering and voice recognition • HiFi 2 Audio DSP — DSP core for low power MP3
audio processing • HiFi EP Audio DSP — A superset of HiFi 2 with optimizations for DTS Master Audio, voice pre- and post-processing, and cache management • HiFi 3 Audio DSP — 32-bit DSP for audio enhancement algorithms, wideband voice codecs, and multi-channel audio • HiFi 3z Audio DSP — For lower-powered audio, wideband voice codecs, and neural-network-based
speech recognition. • HiFi 4 DSP - Higher performance DSP for applications such as multi-channel object-based audio standards. • HiFi 5 DSP - For digital assistants, infotainment, and voice-controlled products.
Vision DSPs • Vision P5 and P6 DSP. • Vision C5 DSP, for neural network computational tasks.
Adoption •
AMD TrueAudio, available in select
GPU products based on the
GCN2 microarchitecture, integrates an HiFi EP Audio DSP
on-die. Hardware integration of the DSP is dropped since GCN4, with TrueAudio Next switching to a
GPGPU-based approach. •
Microsoft HoloLens incorporates a custom
coprocessor fabricated on
TSMC's
28nm process node, integrating 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has around 65 million
logic gates, 8 MB of
SRAM, and 1 GB of
low-power DDR3 RAM. •
Espressif ESP8266 and
ESP32 Wi-Fi
IoT SoCs use respectively the "Diamond Standard 106Micro" (by Espressif referred to as "L106") and the LX6. •
Spreadtrum, licensing the HiFi DSP. •
VIA Technologies, using the HiFi DSP in an embedded SoC. •
Realtek standardized on the HiFi audio DSP for mobile and PC products. == History ==