Tensilica Announces Diamond Standard 330HiFi, a Low-Power 24-bit Audio DSP

Update: Cadence Completes Acquisition of Tensilica (Apr 24, 2013)

Twenty Audio Application Software Solutions Available for New Diamond 330HiFi Core

SANTA CLARA, CA – February 20, 2006 –Tensilica, Inc. today introduced the Diamond Standard 330HiFi, a low-power, 24-bit audio DSP (digital signal processing) core that allows SOC (system on chip) designers to quickly add high quality audio to their chip designs. To expedite quick design in, Tensilica offers a comprehensive set of software encoders and decoders for all popular audio standards, including AAC LC, aacPlusTM v1 and v2, AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate speech), Dolby Digital AC-3, Dolby Digital Plus, G723-1 and G729AB VoIP (Voice over IP), MP3, QSound Labs microQ, Sonic Networks’ Embedded Audio Synthesis (EAS™), SRS Labs WOW XT and Xspace 3D, and WMA (Windows Media Audio). These software packages have been optimized for optimal performance on the Diamond Standard 330HiFi processor.

“The Diamond Standard 330HiFi processor is based on our proven Xtensa HIFi Audio Engine, which has been shipped in tens of millions of consumer products,” stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica’s vice president of marketing. “Design teams have selected our audio solutions because of the wide range of audio software available, because of the superior quality of 24-bit audio, and because they’re very low power for portable audio applications such as mobile phones and portable music players.”

24-bit Audio is Superior to 16-bit Audio

The Diamond Standard 330HiFi employs 24-bit audio data processing within the processor core, which has inherent advantages over common 16-bit audio processors in use today. It provides superior sound quality of compressed audio files due to the increased precision available for intermediate calculations in the compression and decompression algorithms. The Diamond Standard 330HiFi is fully compatible with all industry standard audio-coding formats, and delivers noticeably superior sound quality even when decoding and playing back pre-recorded 16-bit encoded music files.

Low Power for Portable Applications

At half the power per MHz and half of the required MHz, Tensilica’s Diamond Standard 330HiFi uses four times less energy for audio encoding/decoding than a typical DSP-enhanced RISC processor, such as the ARM968E-S. Based on TSMC’s 0.13 nm LV process, running at 200 MHz, static power for the Diamond Standard 330HiFi is 0.40 mW, dynamic power is 17.8 mW, and total power is 18.2 mW or 0.091 mW/MHz. The maximum required MHz (worst case bit stream) for the MPEG-4 AAC LC encoder with the Diamond Standard 330HiFi is just 38 MHz.

Architectural Efficiency

The Diamond Standard 330HiFi employs Tensilica’s VLIW technology to deliver ultra-low power with minimal clock rate requirements while reducing code size. The Diamond 330HiFi can modelessly mix 16, 24, and dual-issue 64-bit instructions for maximum optimization. It features a dual MAC (multiply accumulate) architecture supporting both 24x24- and 32-x16-bit arithmetic on both MAC units. Numerous features such as saturation, fractional arithmetic, and signedness are used with the multiply/accumulate and arithmetic operations to ease codec porting and implementation effort. Also provided are operations to facilitate bit stream access and variable-length (Huffman) encoding and decoding.

Widest Range of Audio Packages

Tensilica offers 20 audio packages for the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine, so these functions can be integrated into a SOC design, with no additional codec software development required.

• aacPlus v2 decoder: implements MPEG-4 aacPlus v2 decoding compliant with ISO/IEC 14496-3 and the 3GPP specification for Enhanced aacPlus, supporting AAC, PS (Parametric Stereo), and SBR (Spectral Band Replication) in mono, stereo and multichannel configurations.

• aacPlus v2 encoder: implements MPEG-4 aacPlus v2 encoding compliant with ISO/IEC 14496-3 and the 3GPP specification for Enhanced aacPlus, supporting AAC PS and SBR in mono, stereo and multichannel configurations.

• aacPlus v1 decoder: implements MPEG-4 aacPlus v1 decoding compliant with ISO/IEC 14496-3 and the 3GPP specification for aacPlus, supporting AAC SBR in mono, stereo and multichannel configurations.

• aacPlus v1 encoder: implements MPEG-4 aacPlus v1 encoding compliant with ISO/IEC 14496-3 and the 3GPP specification for aacPlus, supporting AAC SBR in mono, stereo and multichannel configurations.

• AAC LC decoder: implements MPEG-2/4 AAC decoding compliant with ISO/IEC 14496-3, supporting MPEG-2/4 AAC LC and LC multi-channel files as well as the decoding of ADIF, ADTS, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 file format data streams.

• AAC LC encoder: implements MPEG-4 AAC LC and MPEG-2 AAC LC 2-channel encoding compliant with ISO/IEC 14496-3, supporting Constant Bit Rate, Variable Bit Rate, TNS, PNS, Joint Stereo, ADIF and ADTS encoding formats.

• Dolby Digital AC-3 decoder: implements the complete Dolby Digital AC-3 audio decoder with multichannel 5.1 decoding. It supports all standard down-mix modes and the full range of bit and sample rates.

• Dolby Digital AC-3 Consumer encoder (DDCE): implements the consumer version of the Dolby Digital encoder, supporting 1- and 2-channel encoding over the full range of bit and sample rates.

• Dolby Digital Plus Consumer decoder: implements the complete Dolby Digital Plus Consumer decoder with multichannel 5.1 decoding as well as the Dolby Digital converter for compatibility with existing Dolby Digital 5.1 receivers. It supports all standard down-mix modes and the full range of bit and sample rates.

• MP3 decoder: implements MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-2.5 (extensions of MPEG-1) layer 1/2/3 (MP3) decoding with support for constant bit rate, variable bit rate, and free formats. It is fully compliant with ISC/IEC 11172-4.

• MP3 encoder: implements MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-2.5 (extensions of MPEG-1) layer 1/2/3 (MP3) encoding with support for joint stereo coding for better efficiency and support for the constant bit rate format.

• QSound microQ components: implements QSound’s microQ audio components - a MIDI wavetable synthesis engine with a scalable sample set, a multi-channel stereo mixer. Has a wide range of processes to control frequency response, dynamics and spatial enhancements, as well as full 3D positional audio for games.

• Sonic Networks EAS: implements an interactive audio synthesis engine to support ringtone and game audio including a General MIDI (GM) synthesizer, matched soundsets, support for all ringtone formats, digital audio effects, and graphics synchronization.

• SRS Labs WOW XT and Xspace 3D: SRS WOW improves the dynamic audio performance of compressed audio, expands the size of the audio image and improves the perception of low frequency sound. Xspace 3D places multiple auditory objects within a 3D space around a listener's head and includes a broad range of effects and features that is built into the solutions, such as reverb, Doppler, sample rate converter, and built-in patented TruBass bass enhancement technology.

• WMA decoder: implements decoding of high-, mid-, and low-rate WMA data streams as well as the decoding of ASF (Advanced Streaming Format) data streams and is fully compliant with Microsoft WMA test specifications.

• WMA encoder: implements encoding of high-, mid-, and low-rate WMA data streams as well as the encoding of ASF (Advanced Streaming Format) data streams and is fully compliant with Microsoft WMA test specifications.

• AMR narrowband speech codec: implements AMR narrowband speech decoding and encoding and is fully compliant with the 3GPP specifications for the AMR NB codec.

• AMR Wideband speech codec: implements AMR wideband speech decoding and encoding and is fully compliant with the 3GPP specifications for the AMR WB codec.

• G723-1 VoIP codec: implements ITU-T G723-1 speech coding and decoding.

• G729AB VoIP codec: implements ITU-T G729AB speech coding and decoding.

Based on Proven Xtensa ISA

The entire Diamond Standard family is based on Tensilica’s proven Xtensa processor architecture, a post-RISC-style architecture with native 32-bit data types (operands and ALUs) for the baseline 80+ instructions. Compact 24-bit/16-bit instruction encoding reduces power consumption and produces 25 to 50 percent smaller code (better code density) than standard 32-bit architectures. Register windows for efficient procedure switches provide high performance with low power. The base Xtensa ISA also provides powerful branch instructions and complex bit manipulations.

Availability

Tensilica’s new Diamond Standard family of processors is available now, either direct from Tensilica or from a roster of ASIC and foundry partners also announced today. See separate news releases or go to www.tensilica.com for more information.

About Tensilica

Tensilica offers the broadest line of processor cores on the market today, with the six new members of the Diamond Standard processor family plus an infinite number of Xtensa configurable processor possibilities for customers requiring optimized, application-specific solutions. Tensilica’s low-power, benchmark-proven processors have been designed into high-volume products at industry leaders in the digital consumer, networking and telecommunications markets. Tensilica also provides industry leading automated tool support for its processor families. For more information, visit www.tensilica.com.