Do You Believe Tensilica's Marketing Claims?

This question was posed on John Cooley's Deepchip web site (see http://www.deepchip.com/items/0447-06.html). A reader posted, "TenSilica is closer to ARC than ARM, but when I last looked, TenSilica was miles ahead of ARC. ARC give you more flexibility in that you writethe entire extension in Verilog, and you are allowed to do pretty muchwhatever you want, while TenSilica is more constraining, but TenSilica'sstuff is far more polished, with everything being automated. I was very impressed with what I saw from TenSilica, and I wouldn'thesitate to recommend them. In my experience, it's rare to find a companywhose products actually live up to the marketing claims, especially in IP. " Read the full story.

Atheros Licenses Xtensa Processor

Atheros, a leading provider of wireless solutions, has licensed the Xtensa processor for use in future designs. "We selected Tensilica's Xtensa processor because of its high-performance, low power and small size which are ideal for a wide range of very compact wireless applications," said Rick Bahr, VP of Engineering for Atheros Communications. "Xtensa's configurable and extensible microprocessor core provides Atheros and our customers with a high level of design flexibility required to satisfy the growing array of end-product application requirements."

See the press release at http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2005_09_26.htm

Congratulation Ikanos

Congratulations to Ikanos Communications on their successful initial public offering. [NASDAQ symbol: IKAN]. Tensilica is proud to be a key ingredient in their success. Ikanos uses the Xtensa processor as the heart of its Burst Mode Engine (BME) chip, which is in the SmartLeap 8100, SmartLeap 8800 and CleverConnect 150 chip sets.

Chris Rowen to Keynote EMSOFT Conference

Tensilica's president and CEO, Chris Rowen, will be the keynote speaker at tomorrow's EMSOFT conference. His speech will discuss "Multiprocessor SOC Design: Revolution Now!" Already, Tensilica's customers use, on average, 6 processors per SOC design, so the multiple processor revolution certainly is occuring. One customer used almost 200 processors in a recent networking design.

EMSOFT is the leading conference for research in embedded systems software. Embedded computing pervades everyday life. Embedded software must meet demanding criteria for correctness, performance, power consumption, and development cost. EMSOFT is the flagship conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Computing (SIGBED).

Chris' talk is at 8:30 am on Wednesday, September 21, in Jersey City, New Jersey. See http://www.princeton.edu/%7Ewolf/EMSOFT-2005/index.htm for more information on this conference.