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See HiFi 2 White Paper
Turnkey 24-bit Audio for SOC Designs
Digital audio is exploding, as the next shift occurs in the storage, transmission, and reproduction of sound. A wide range of electronic devices, from portable consumer music players to DVD players to Blue-ray Disk players and professional sound reproduction equipment, requires the ability to efficiently handle digitally compressed audio.
Tensilica's HiFi 2 Audio Engine is the answer for SOC designers. This page includes the following information:
Digital Audio Requirements
Electronic devices today need to be flexible enough to handle multiple compression standards. Depending on the type of device and its intended use, it may need to have encode/decode (codec) capabilities for many different formats. Neither traditional approaches to include these codecs in an electronic system are optimal solutions. Fixed-gate configurations usually can only handle one format, and can't be changed to run any others or adapt to changes in standards. Most general-purpose CPUs and DSPs can execute multiple software-defined codecs, but they can be very inefficient in both area (instruction memory) and power consumption.
The Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine is Better
Tensilica's Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine provides a fully optimized approach to embedding multiple audio standards into SOC designs. Using Tensilica's proven Xtensa LX processor technology, it is optimized to run all of the codecs written in C in a pre-packaged, drop-in format with all software components pre-ported. It can approach the performance of fixed-gate implementations, while providing the flexibility, time to market, and risk reduction of a processor. Simultaneously, it reduces silicon area and power consumption.
Read more about the technology behind the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine.
Read the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine product brief.
<6 MHz MP3 Decode
Tensilica optimized the MP3 decoder for its Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine and Diamond Standard 330HiFi processor core. This MP3 decoder now runs at the lowest power and is the most efficient in the industry, requiring just 5.7 MHz when running at 128 Kbps, 44.1 KHz and dissipating 0.45 mW in TSMC’s 65nm LP process (including memories). This makes Tensilica’s Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine ideal for adding MP3 playback to cellular phones, where current carrier requirements are for 100 hours of playback time on a battery charge, and increasing to 200 hours in the near future.
This 5.7 MHz requirement includes the entire MP3 decode functionality, including MPEG container parsing and variable length decoding (VLD, also known as Huffman decoding). Some competing offerings are merely accelerator blocks that exclude portions of the complex control code in MP3 such as VLD, and thus rely on a processor to perform VLD decoding. Tensilica’s 5.7 MHz figure is all inclusive.
Available Two Ways
You can quickly and easily add low-power optimized audio to your next chip design:
- The HiFi 2 Audio Engine is a check-box option for the Xtensa LX processor. So if you want to add audio, but also optimize the processor for other tasks, this is the solution for you.
- The same HiFi 2 Audio Engine is designed into our Diamond Standard 330HiFi core. If you want a complete drop-in audio solution and do not need to further modify the core, this is the best solution for you.
Audio and Voice Software Packages
The following audio packages are part of the Xtensa
HiFi 2 Audio solution:
The following voice packages are available for the HiFi 2 Audio Engine:
Because the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine is programmable,
multiple standards can run on the same hardware,
allowing the same device to play or record
digital audio in different standards.
Designers can further customize the underlying
Xtensa LX processor so it can be used for other functions
on the chip.
Blu-ray Disc Ready
The HiFi 2 Audio Engine is the ideal audio DSP for Blu-ray Disc SOCs. Blu-ray Disc unleashes a new level of entertainment in the home with up to 7.1 channel audio, and video that surpasses the quality of standard DVDs by up to 6x. New features include Secondary Audio to support interactive content and director’s commentary, higher resolution compressed audio streams for enhanced audio reproduction, and lossless audio formats that provide bit-for-bit identical reproduction of the original studio master in up to 7.1 channels.
New codecs have been developed and introduced by Dolby and DTS to support these audio capabilities - Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio. The combination of increased codec complexity and support for simultaneous Secondary Audio decoding and mixing of decoded Primary and Secondary audio has resulted in a huge step function increase in signal processing compared to the DVD standard. The HiFi 2 Audio Engine meets the challenge with extremely efficient implementations of all the mandatory and optional Dolby and DTS codecs enabling the development of area and power efficient Blu-ray Disc SOCs.
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.
A Complete Solution
Here’s a picture of what you get to jumpstart
your SOC design when you use the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio
Engine.
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