Tensilica Announces Industry’s Highest Performance, Most Energy Efficient DSP Core

Diamond Standard 545CK Gets Highest Score on BDTI Benchmarks

SANTA CLARA, CA – February 20, 2006 – Tensilica, Inc. today introduced the industry’s highest performance licensable DSP core, the Diamond Standard 545CK processor. The Diamond Standard 545CK synthesizable processor core received the highest score recorded to date for a licensable processor core on the BDTI Benchmarks^TM by Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BDTI). Its BDTIsimMark2000^TM score of 3490 at 220 MHz is 30 percent faster than the score for the next-fastest licensable core benchmarked by BDTI, the CEVA-X1620.* Also, the Diamond Standard 545CK is over twice as energy efficient as any other core benchmarked by BDTI to date.

“The Diamond Series 545CK sets a new standard for DSPs, with the highest performance ever recorded on the BDTI Benchmarks for a licensable core,” stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica’s vice president of marketing. “Because it also is the most energy efficient DSP core, it is ideal for handheld applications.”

The Diamond Standard 545CK is a high-performance VLIW (very long instruction word) DSP that features modeless scalar and VLIW instruction mixing. It uses 64-bit VLIW instructions with 3 issues per cycles. It employs compact Xtensa 16/24-bit instruction coding when multi-issue instructions cannot be scheduled to keep code size to a minimum. Eight 16-bit multipliers can operate in SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) mode with 16-entry, 160-bit wide vector registers. A Viterbi accelerator is designed in for communications baseband applications.

Most Energy Efficient DSP Core

The Diamond Standard 545CK achieved a BDTIsimMark2000TM per-mW score of 80. This is over twice as energy efficient as any other core benchmarked by BDTI to date.

Strong DSP Function Library

The Xtensa Xplorer Diamond Edition (DE) software development toolkit contains a number of source files for various common DSP functions. These DSP function examples include documentation, assembly and C source to allow rapid DSP code development when using Tensilica’s Diamond Standard 545CK and software development environment. The provided libraries include complex 1-d FFT, 8th order IIR filter, LMS filter, Real Block FIR filter and one sample FIR filter.

Based on Proven Xtensa ISA

The entire Diamond Standard family is based on Tensilica’s proven Xtensa processor architecture, a post-RISC-style architecture with native 32-bit data types (operands and ALUs) for the baseline 80+ instructions. Compact 24-bit/16-bit instruction encoding reduces power consumption and produces 25 to 50 percent smaller code (better code density) than standard 32-bit architectures. Register windows for efficient procedure switches provide high performance with low power. The base Xtensa ISA also provides powerful branch instructions and complex bit manipulations.

Architecture Optimized for C-Code and Compilation

The Diamond 545CK is fully C-programmable utilizing Tensilica’s advanced XCC compiler technology. The XCC compiler automatically analyzes and vectorizes C source code with no user intervention. Additionally, the compiler produces 16/24 and 64-bit VLIW instructions through analysis of source code. All 16, 24 and 64-bit instructions can be freely intermixed in the instruction stream, and the processor automatically mode-switches between instructions of different lengths.

Industry Leading I/O Bandwidth

The Diamond 545CK also provides industry leading I/O (input/output) bandwidth. Dual 128-bit load/store units deliver eight times the I/O bandwidth of conventional 16-bit XY-style DSPs or 32-bit RISC-style CPUs. And Tensilica’s industry-first streaming data queue interfaces provide an additional 32-bit data flow input queue and separate 32-bit output queue that operate under program control but without conventional load and store operations. This allows the Diamond 545CK to sustain continuous data movement operations within an SOC’s (System On Chip) application data plane while simultaneously performing computations.

Availability

Tensilica’s new Diamond Standard family of processors is available now, either direct from Tensilica or from a roster of ASIC and foundry partners also announced today. See separate press releases or go to www.tensilica.com for more details.

About Tensilica

Tensilica offers the broadest line of controller, CPU and specialty DSP processors on the market today, in both an off-the-shelf format via the Diamond Standard Series cores and with full designer configurability with the Xtensa processor family. Tensilica’s low-power, benchmark proven processors have been designed into high-volume products at industry leaders in the digital consumer, networking and telecommunications markets. All Tensilica processor cores are complete with a matching software development tool environment, portfolio of system simulation models, and hardware implementation tool support. For more information on Tensilica's patented approach to the creation of application-specific building blocks for SOC design, visit www.tensilica.com.

* The BDTIsimMark2000™ provides a summary measure of DSP speed. All scores use worst-case clock speeds for the TSMC CL013G process and ARM Artisan SAGE-X library. For more information and scores see www.BDTI.com. Scores © 2006 BDTI.
** The Diamond 535CK tested consumes a static leakage power of 0.7 mW plus dynamic switching power of 0.2 mW/MHz on a representative computational benchmark kernel under typical operating conditions.

# # #

Editors’ Notes:

• Tensilica and Xtensa are registered trademarks belonging to Tensilica Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
• Tensilica’s announced licensees include Agilent, ALPS, AMCC (JNI Corporation), Astute Networks, Atheros, ATI, Avision, Bay Microsystems, Berkeley Wireless Research Center, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, Cypress, Crimson Microsystems, ETRI, FUJIFILM Microdevices, Fujitsu Ltd., Hudson Soft, Hughes Network Systems, Ikanos Communications, LG Electronics, Marvell, MediaWorks, NEC Laboratories America, NEC Corporation, NetEffect, Neterion, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), NVIDIA, Olympus Optical Co. Ltd., sci-worx, Seiko Epson, Solid State Systems, Sony, STMicroelectronics, Stretch, TranSwitch Corporation, u-Nav Microelectronics, and Victor Company of Japan (JVC)