Tensilica Demonstrates Audio, Video and Next-Generation Baseband DSP in Barcelona

Many leading companies are responding to the current market slowdown by accelerating the rate of new product innovation -- providing compelling new features consumers will want in their next-generation devices, stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica's vice president of marketing and business development. Tensilica enables rapid design of SOCs for mobile devices that deliver advanced voice and audio features, high-quality video, and advanced baseband capabilities, providing both flexible and cost-effective SOC designs.

Tensilica's Xtensa customizable dataplane processors are widely employed by companies for baseband DSP tasks. Dataplane Processor Units (DPUs) are ideal building blocks for the next generation of high-speed digital radios because they are small, provide flexibility, and can be rapidly customized to provide optimum DSP speed, power, and performance. Tensilica's DPUs can be used in many applications where general-purpose DSP cores are too slow and custom logic designed with RTL (register transfer level) blocks do not provide enough flexibility and require extensive verification, increasing design risk.

One of Tensilica's baseband DSP customers, Ibiquity Digital, will demonstrate its low power, portable terrestrial HD radio receiver in a mobile handset accessory format. The Ibiquity design employs Tensilica processors for both the baseband DSP and audio DSP.

Tensilica's market-proven HiFi Audio DSP has been designed into millions of cellular phones and mobile consumer electronic devices. With the lowest power-consumption of any licensable audio DSP and the largest available library of optimized audio application software, the HiFi audio DSP has been used in mobile applications by five of the top 10 semiconductor companies.

At MWC, Tensilica will demonstrate sound-enhancing audio post-processing software from its partners, SRS Labs and AM3D, running on the HiFi Audio DSP.

Tensilica's 388VDO DSP is a proven multi-standard SD video DSP that has been employed in several portable devices. It is fully software programmable, providing the flexibility to support multiple video standards. Tensilica's Xtensa DPUs are also tailored for video pre-processing for mobile phone camera image signal processing and for video post-processing for image enhancement on both LCD displays and cell phone projectors. With firmware updates to respond to the array of Internet-driven video codecs becoming a common event for the latest generation smart phones and the emergence of apps stores, full video datapath software programmability offers handset manufacturers another way to further delight and engage their customers.

At MWC, Tensilica will demonstrate a production video card that employs the 388VDO for programmable multi-format SD video.