HiFi 2 Audio Engine

Products » Audio DSP » HiFi 2 Audio Engine

A Click-Box Solution to Add Audio to Your SOC Design

Need audio in your next SOC design. You can either add the 300HiFi Audio Processor, a turnkey, drop-in solution, or pick the HiFi 2 Audio Engine click box in the Xtensa Processor Generator. This adds the entire HiFi Audio instruction set, and you can make other customizations to the Xtensa processor to fit your application.

Over 50 popular audio codecs have been pre-ported to the HiFi Audio Engine, which makes it a “drop-in" block for any SOC application requiring high quality, 24-bit audio capability.

Specialized audio instructions designed into the HiFi Audio Engine by Tensilica increase code density (reducing memory requirements) and reduce Mhz requirements (lowering power). Techniques used to define these custom instructions include Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD - parallelization), VLIW (multiple operations per cycle), and flexible data path widths (optimum data widths to reduce power).

All of these advanced processor techniques are pre-built into the HiFi hardware, and the codecs supplied by Tensilica utilize this hardware to produce the most efficient programmable audio engine available for licensing.

Contents

Features

  • Based on standard 32-bit RISC architecture with integrated 24-bit audio processing instructions including Variable Length Decode (VLD)
  • Dual-issue VLIW DSP with 24-bit data path and instructions customized for audio codecs
  • Industry-leading low-power consumption coupled with high-fidelity 24-bit audio
  • Popular digital audio software pre-ported (MP-3, AAC, WMA, AC-3, MIDI)
  • Modeless switching between 16-, 24-, and 64-bit dual-issue instructions
  • Dual MACs can operate as 32X16-bit/24X24-bit
  • 4 Kbyte Instruction and 8 Kbyte data 2-way set associative caches, programmable write-through or write-back
  • 32-bit input/output FIFO interfaces
  • 64/32-bit system interface with AHB-lite bridge

Benefits

  • High quality (24-bit) audio DSP supporting the widest range of audio codecs
  • Fast TTM for applications requiring digital audio support
  • Ultra-low power consumption increases battery life in portable applications
  • Single audio engine supports many codecs, reduces hardware overhead compared to separate hard-wired hardware blocks for each codec
  • Programmable engine can support new future codec implementations
  • Audio engine has performance headroom to perform functions other than digital audio processing

Audio Codec Support

The following audio packages are part of the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine:

The following voice packages are available for the HiFi 2 Audio and 330HiFi Audio Processor:

Because the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine and 330 HiFi are programmable, multiple standards can run on the same hardware, allowing the same device to play or record digital audio in different standards.

Simplified Programming

A key advantage of the HiFi 2 Audio Engine is its simple Xtensa processor-based programming model. Because of the efficiency of the optimized audio and voice instructions, software developers can port audio and voice codecs completely in C while maintaining or surpassing the performance of assembly on other DSP and CPU architectures.