HiFi 2 Audio DSP Product Brief
330HIFi Audio DSP Product Brief
388VDO Video DSP Product Brief
Everything You Wanted to Know About Blu-ray Audio, but were afraid to hear
Put Low-Power, Low-Overhead, High-Fidelity Digital Sound in Your Next ASIC or SOC
A Designer's Guide to HD Video Pre- and Post-Processing
How to Add Low-Power, Multi-Codec Digital Video and Audio to Your Next ASIC or SOC Design
Tensilica's processor technology enables ideal video processors because the datapath can be customized to exactly match video streams and specialized instructions can be added to handle the most demanding video algorithms. Tensilica's processors can be used for:
No matter which Tensilica processor you pick, you will also get a fully automatically generated matching tool set with a vectorizing compiler, profiling tools with deep visibility for easy development, and fast and accurate simulations for fast development.
Tensilica's Diamond Standard processors and Xtensa customizable processors are the most code-efficient 32-bit processors on the market today. While they excelin the data plane, they're perfectly matched for standard control tasks, too.
The 388 VDO Video Engine, a turn-key, drop-in ASIC design solution ptimized for multi-standard and multi-resolution SD video (also known as D1), with software for H.264 Main profile decode, MPEG-4 Advanced Simple profile decode, VC-1/WMV9 decode, MPEG-2 Main profile decode, and MPEG-4 Advanced Simple profile encode, JPEG and more.
The 388VDO Engine hosts all the key video processing functions in software on the cores – including the network abstraction layer, picture layer, slice layer, bit-stream parsing and entropy decoding and encoding. This includes the computationally demanding CABAC (Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) decoding in the H.264 Main profile decoder. By implementing CABAC in instruction set extensions, Tensilica was able to create a low MHz and power efficient version of CABAC in less than half the area of a typical CABAC hardware block.
Find out more about this video engine.
Several of Tensilica’s customers have built their own video engines and other audio-video solutions based on the Xtensa technology.
The "secret sauce" for the user experience is optimal video post processing to fit the source material and viewing format. Tensilica's cores can be used for embedded control plus Xtensa processors can be customized to create programmable post-processing blocks such as scalars, deinterlacers, filers, etc. Xtensa processors can supply the necessary bandwidth, even for uncompressed HD video.
Figuring out how to optimize an Xtensa processor for video applications isn't hard. We even have a tool - the XPRES Compiler - that does this automatically for you. Just input your C/C++ code, and it will figure out how to optimize an Xtensa LX processor core you.
We used the XPRES compiler on a motion adaptive deinterlacing algorithm to see how much we could improve performance in just a few minutes, all automatically. We also used TIE to develop a 16-SIMD, 3-VLIW, dual load/store version of Xtensa LX. See how they compared:
|
Cycles Req'd for 1Kx1K
|
Cycles per Pixel
|
Mpixel/sec @ 400 MHz
|
|
| Baseline Xtensa |
30,960,000
|
29.5
|
13.5
|
| Using XPRES Compiler |
660,000
|
0.6
|
635
|
| TIE for 16-SIMD, 3-VLIW, dual load/store |
340,000
|
0.3
|
1234
|
Because video processing is so complex, many of our customers use multiple cores (we even use two cores inside our 388VDO). Because we've built in the ability to bypass the time-consuming load-store architecture and stream data directly between processors (like you can with RTL blocks), using multiple cores is very efficient.
No matter which solution you pick, Tensilica provides a complete matching software development tool-chain 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.
Sometimes it just makes more sense to hardwire complex video functions. Tensilica offers the Diamond Standard controllers and even basic Xtensa processor cores for efficient, low-power control tasks.