Two Korean Universities Licence Tensilica’s Xtensa Configurable Processor

“Our agreement with these two universities underscores our dedication to working with high level academic institutions around the world to train the next-generation of design engineers in the inherent advantages of configuring and extending processors for the exact application,” stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica’s vice president of marketing. “Because Xtensa processors are tailored for the exact application, they are very efficient and can do a better job of meeting requirements for performance, area, and power consumption than general-purpose processor cores. We now have over 80 universities worldwide that use Xtensa processors in their research and/or classrooms.”

The CoSoC was established with the support of Korea’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy in April of 2003 with a five-year business plan for propagation of platform-based SOC design technologies. The third SOC Design Contest is being held to help spread platform-based SOC design methodologies to undergraduate and graduate school students and to improve their creative design skills. By having the students directly experience the SOC design methodologies and design environment, the Korean government believes that the country’s SOC design infrastructure will be expanded. This should lead to the expansion of SOC design activities in companies as well, and eventually become foundation for competitiveness. The contest concludes with an award ceremony on December 7, 2007.

“By utilizing the configurability of Tensilica’s Xtensa processors, we plan to study SOC architecture optimization,” said Soo-yik Chae, a professor from CoSoC of Seoul National Univ. “We expect that students can easily learn to design using a configurable processor and that the Xtensa processor will help us establish foundation technology for the study of SOC configurations.”

KAIST plans to use the Xtensa processor in a new multimedia SOC development platform. “We are in the process of developing a multimedia SOC for mobile applications with an integrated H.264 decoder and plan to use the Xtensa processor in the development platform,” said Prof. Jong-min Kyung of KAIST. According to Prof. Kyung, KAIST plans to supply a development environment that can be easily used at universities, as well as small and medium sized companies. Through this, engineers and students are expected to accelerate time-to-market of multimedia SOC products with higher performance and less power consumption than a general purpose processor.