Tensilica Appoints Bill Huffman Chief Architect

Santa Clara, Calif., December 17, 2001 ... Tensilica Inc. today announced that Bill Huffman has been named chief architect for the privately-held configurable and extensible microprocessor core supplier. In this position, he will guide the development of all the company’s Xtensa and future architectures, and he will report to Beatrice Fu, vice president of engineering. Huffman replaces Earl A. Killian, who will move to a technical advisory and consulting role with the company.

According to Chris Rowen Ph.D., Tensilica’s president and CEO, “Bill Huffman brings a wealth of processor design experience to the company, and we plan to utilize all of his skills and knowledge as we develop significant new processor architectures and bring them to market.”

Before this appointment, Huffman spent the past 10 years with Silicon Graphics, most recently holding the position of chief scientist where he was responsible for architecting and designing processors and memory subsystems for SGI's system business. Earlier, he was principal scientist and member of the technical staff responsible for numerous processor and system development activities. Prior to SGI, he was associated with Alliant Computer Systems, Inc. and Computervision.

Huffman was graduated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving Bachelors of Science (Phi Beta Kappa) and Masters of Science Degrees in Physics. Bill has been awarded 8 patents, and has 13 pending.

About Tensilica, Inc.

Tensilica was founded in July 1997 to address the fast-growing market for configurable processors and software development tools for high volume, embedded systems. Using the company's proprietary Xtensa Processor Generator, system-on-chip (SOC) designers can develop a processor subsystem hardware design and a complete software development tool environment tailored to their specific requirements in hours. Tensilica's solutions provide a proven, easy-to-use, methodology that enables designers to achieve optimum application performance in minimum design time. The Company is engaged in research, development, and customer support from its offices in Santa Clara, California; Burlington, Massachusetts; Princeton, NJ; Raleigh, NC; Houston, Texas; Oxford, U.K.; Stockholm, Sweden; Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.; and Yokohama, Japan. Tensilica is headquartered in Santa Clara, California (95054) at 3255-6 Scott Boulevard, and can be reached at (408) 986-8000 or via www.tensilica.com on the World Wide Web.

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Editors’ Notes:

Tensilica’s announced licensees are Avision, Berkeley Wireless Research Center, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, Fujitsu Ltd., Hughes Network Systems, Ikanos Communications, JNI Corporation, Marvell (Galileo Technology), Mindspeed Technologies, National Semiconductor, NEC Networks, NEC Solutions, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), ONEX Communications, Osaka & Kyoto Universities, TranSwitch Corporation, Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC), and ZiLOG.

“Tensilica” and "Xtensa" are registered trademarks belonging to Tensilica Inc. All other registered trademarks or trademarks are property of their respective owners.