MegaChips Becomes Tensilica Authorized Design Center

MegaChips Corporation, of Osaka, Japan, has become an authorized Tensilica design center. Companies needing SOC (system-on-chip) design services in Japan can take advantage of MegaChips’ expertise in the design of video and imaging products as well as communications products. For more information, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_12_15.htm

ASTRI Selects Tensilica Processor Cores for Video Research

Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Company Limited (ASTRI) has selected Tensilica’s Xtensa customizable processor cores for a video research project. The government of Hong Kong created ASTRI to perform high-quality R&D (research and development) for technology transfer to industry, develop needed technical human resources, and act as a focal point that brings together industry and university R&D assets.
For more information, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_12_10.htm

HyperSilicon Becomes New Tensilica Prototyping Partner in China

HyperSilicon Co., Ltd, of Beijing, China, has become Tensilica's newest SOC prototyping partner, supporting customers of both the Xtensa customizable processors and the Diamond Standard processor cores in the growing China market. HyperSilicon has particular expertise in designing FPGA development boards, which are often used to test new chip designs before producing the chip in silicon. More information is available at http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_12_08.htm

Sibridge Technologies Becomes Tensilica Authorized Design Center

Sibridge Technologies has become an authorized Tensilica design center, supporting customers of both the Xtensa configurable processors and the Diamond Standard processor cores. Sibridge has offices in Fremont, CA, and Ahmedabad, India, and supports a number of global electronics companies.

Sibridge provides innovative solutions for design, verification, and silicon platform software development of SoCs to semiconductors worldwide. The company offers a unique blend of three critical components in the development of SoCs: design and verification IP portfolios; strong chip design, integration and verification expertise; and pre and post silicon firmware development and validation for streaming media and networking applications.

For more information, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_12_04.htm

P-Product Becomes Tensilica Authorized Software Design Center

P-Product, of Needham, MA, has joined Tensilica’s Xtensions Partner network as an authorized software design center, specializing in efficient implementations of digital signal processing (DSP) software. P-Product has extensive expertise in audio and video as well as in WiMAX and LTE. P-Product has already ported multiple audio software modules to Tensilica’s popular HiFi 2 Audio Engine. For more information, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_12_02.htm

HiFi 2 Audio DSP Now Supports Dolby DAB+

Tensilica added the aacPlus by Dolby for Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB+) decoder to its audio codec library for its Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio DSP, one of the most popular commercial audio cores for system-on-chip (SOC) designs.

DAB+ is the successor to DAB which is currently deployed in many European countries, Canada, China and South Korea. The DAB+ standard is based on HE-AAC v2, which provides audio with equivalent or better subjective quality at lower bit rates than MPEG Audio Layer II used in DAB. The DAB+ standard is now being adopted by digital radio stations. It is already being broadcast in Italy, Malta and Singapore and deployments are planned for later this year and 2009 in Australia, Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and other countries around the globe.

For more, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_11_19.htm

Carbon and Tensilica Partner for Pre-Silicon Firmware Development

“Tensilica’s cycle-accurate processor models, running together with implementation-accurate Carbon Models in an SoC Designer environment, will enable users to debug complex firmware and hardware issues well in advance of silicon,” stated Bill Neifert, vice president of business development for Carbon Design Systems. “SoC Designer’s industry-leading speed will also enable this to be done more quickly than with any other virtual platform. In addition, designers can leverage SoC Designer’s advanced profiling features to quickly see the positive impact Tensilica processors can have in the dataplane of their SOC designs.”
For more info, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_11_18.htm

New RealVideo Codec for 388VDO

bTensilica has ported the RealVideo codec from digital entertainment services company RealNetworks, Inc. (RNWK) to the 388VDO Video Engine, increasing the versatility of this popular video chip subsystem. The RealVideo codec expands the applicability of Tensilica's 388VDO video processor to products that efficiently display Internet content on everything from mobile devices to extended standard definition DTV.

The RealVideo codec is fully compliant with RealVideo 9 and 10, so users can experience high-quality video from numerous sources in China . By using new technology that employs rigorous analysis to decompose and compress video content as well as more sophisticated image segmentation and motion analysis, it provides the same quality video at 80 percent lower bit rate than MPEG-2, 75 percent lower bit rate than HDTV, 45 percent lower bit rate than MPEG-4 (ASP), 30 percent lower bit rate than WMV 9, and 15 percent lower bit rate than H.264.

PowerLayer Microsystems Licenses 388VDO Video

PowerLayer Microsystems (PLM), a fabless IC design company headquartered in Beijing, China, licensed the 388VDO video engine, a complete video subsystem that will be designed into integrated circuits for HDTV sets. The 388VDO will be used to decode content from the Internet.

“Many people want to enjoy their TV and Internet content on one device, and the 388VDO gives us the video quality we need for the display of Internet video and images,” stated Dr. Xu Dong, president and COO, PowerLayer Microsystems. “We were impressed because it was a total drop-in solution, both hardware and software.”

For more info, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_11_4.htm

Panasonic Picks Tensilica

Panasonic Mobile Communications Co. Ltd. (President: Osamu Waki), located in Tsuzuki-ku, Yokohama, Japan, (Panasonic Mobile) has licensed the Xtensa LX2 customizable processor core for a baseband processor integrated circuit for mobile phones. Now Panasonic Mobile will develop several different configurations of the Xtensa processor. For more information, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_10_14.htm