New Energy Estimator Tool Guides Designers to Energy-Efficient SOC Architectures

To address the growing need to pro-actively reduce power consumption in embedded systems, Tensilica announced the Xenergy estimator, a unique energy estimator for both Xtensa configurable processors and Diamond Standard processors. By using the Xenergy tool to optimize for energy early in the SOC design cycle, designers can cut processor and local memory energy requirements by up to half by making intelligent design trade-offs.

“Xenergy will naturally appeal to designers of portable, battery-driven devices such as cellular phones and personal media players, but also to designers of complex SOCs in home entertainment and networking devices where heat is becoming a huge issue,” stated Chris Rowen, Tensilica’s president and CEO. “Tensilica is the first company to provide a realistic way to easily estimate the overall energy impact of different processor configurations and extensions together with application code tuning on each processor with its memory subsystem. The improvement in power at the architectural level is quite dramatic and productive, often dwarfing the power savings painfully achieved at the RTL and physical design levels.”

For more information, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2007_02_26.htm