Portable music players have been among the highest growth consumer electronics devices in the last few years. The chipsets at the heart of these devices must not only perform audio decoding for multiple compression standards, but also perform system tasks such as controlling the user interface, peripheral I/O blocks, and flash memory. Due to the extreme cost pressures in this market, high integration of these functions into a single chip is mandatory.

Tensilica's Diamond Standard 330HiFi is an optimized, drop-in solution for portable music applications, with a complete set of software codecs for multiple popular audio standards.

Tensilica's Diamond Standard 38xVDO family is a set of four video engines optimized for portable devices, with a complete set of software encoders and decoders for popular video standards.

Tensilica’s Xtensa LX2 configurable processor can be customized to perform many of the functions required for portable music players. Because Xtensa processors can be customized with specialized audio instructions and associated acceleration hardware to run these instructions, Xtensa processor can run multiple software-based codecs. Also, because one processor can run multiple codecs, power requirements are reduced. The same processor can be used for not only system control, but also audio codec acceleration, decreasing system complexity and cost.

Xtensa Configuration Highlights

• Custom instructions for audio codec processing
• User-defined I/O ports
• Multiple instructions issued per cycle
• Pre-configured Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine provides off-the-shelf solution

Xtensa Benefits

• System power savings, core can be run at lower frequency due to audio hardware
• Less hardware than hard-wired implementations, decreases system costs
• VLIW (FLIX) instruction encoding increases per cycle performance
• Ports allow unlimited number of general control I/O lines
• Pre-configured Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine provides fast time-to-market