Tool Suites for Hardware Designers and Software Developers

Whether you're a hardware designer or a software developer, an inexperienced engineer or an experienced Tensilica user, Tensilica has a comprehensive set of tools to make your job much easier and more productive.

Diamond Standard software tools provide all of the functionality of the Xtensa software tools. However, since Diamond Standard processor cores are pre-configured and no hardware configuration is appropriate, there are no hardware development tools in that suite. See this section for more details on the Diamond tools.

Designers with existing application software code can profile the application, identify hot spots, add new instructions and execution units to optimize performance, and regenerate a new processor – all within a matter of hours.

Hardware designers with a reference specification can quickly design execution unit semantics with the desired datapath characteristics, add new I/O ports of nearly unlimited complexity to stream data into the new execution unit datapaths, add new instructions to the processor, and write simple C programs to test the new processor – all from within the integrated Xtensa Xplorer design environment.

Configurability of a Tensilica processor core never compromises the underlying base Xtensa instruction set, thereby ensuring availability of a robust ecosystem of third party application software and development tools. All configurable, extensible Xtensa processors are always compatible with major operating systems, debug probes and ICE solutions; and always come with an automatically generated, complete software development toolchain including an advanced integrated development environment based on the ECLIPSE framework, a world-class compiler, a cycle-accurate SystemC-compatible instruction set simulator, and the full industry-standard GNU toolchain.

Tensilica has two Xtensa toolkits, so designers can get just the set of tools that they need:

Xtensa Processor Developer's Toolkit

The Xtensa Processor Developers Toolkit is an integrated design environment that delivers powerful automation tools to your desktop to guide you through the processor customization process. You'll find that Tensilica has created the most advanced and powerful yet easy-to-use tools for processor customization.

Whether you just want to configure the processor to include features you need and remove features you don't, or you want to create, analyze and build extremely high-performance customized Xtensa cores, you get all the tools you need in the Xtensa Processor Developer's Toolkit.

Find out more about the Xtensa Processor Developer's Toolkit.

Xtensa Software Developer's Toolkit

If you need to develop application code for an Xtensa processor, the Xtensa Software Developer's Toolkit provides a comprehensive collection of code generation and analysis tools that will speed the development process.

The Xtensa software development environment is generated - automatically - from the same database as the processor hardware description so you're guaranteed a perfect match. All configuration options and all designer-defined extensions are supported, so there is no need to manually edit or extend the tools. This approach ensures correctness and consistency by construction. Designers get a compiler, linker, assembler, and debugger tuned exactly - and matched exactly - to their tailored processor hardware.

Find out more about the Xtensa Software Developer's Toolkit.

Operating System Support

Many of Tensilica’s customers use commercial real-time operating systems and software IDEs. Tensilica provides full support for application-optimized Xtensa configurations for operating systems and IDEs offered by Express Logic (ThreadX OS), open source Linux, Mentor Graphics (Nucleus Plus), Micrium (uC/OS-II), and Sophia Systems (microITRON).