Tensilica Expands Wireless Baseband Business Unit, Hires Texas Instruments Veteran Eric Dewannain as Vice President/General Manager

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

Santa Clara, CA - June 8, 2010 -Tensilica, Inc. today announced that it has expanded its  baseband business unit and hired Eric F. Dewannain as vice president and general manager. Dewannain was previously general manager of the custom ASIC business unit at Texas Instruments, Incorporated (TI) and, prior to this, general manager of the cable broadband communications business unit. Dewannain has extensive business experience in mobile wireless infrastructure and broadband communications.

Tensilica's customers have used the company's customizable dataplane processor (DPU) technology to design their own digital signal processors (DSPs) for the past 10 years. Two years ago, Tensilica formed its baseband business unit and has since enjoyed great success as the rising star in programmable baseband signal processing.  Customers include Fujitsu, Huawei, NEC, Panasonic, and many other major undisclosed companies, all of whom are engaged in LTE (Long-Term Evolution) and 4G baseband chip design with Tensilica's DPUs and ConnX baseband DSPs. Tensilica's DPUs and ConnX baseband DSPs are ideal for baseband because they can be customized to provide greater power and performance efficiency than standard DSPs."

"Because of our solid DPU foundation and success in baseband signal processing, we've been able to ramp up quickly and add top engineering talent to our team," stated Jack Guedj, Tensilica's president and CEO. "Now, with Eric, we're reaching critical mass with strong leadership to help us continue our growth trajectory."

"It's exciting to join an aggressive company that's rapidly becoming the architecture of choice for programmable baseband signal processing," Dewannain stated. "The amazing thing is how fast we can develop new products and provide optimized solutions for the mobile wireless market using the same Xtensa DPU foundation and tools we license to our customers. Leveraging this strong Xtensa DPU foundation, Tensilica has been able to develop a comprehensive IP (intellectual property) suite tailored for LTE and introduce two generations of ConnX BBE baseband DSPs in less than two years.  Any other IP vendor would take several years to develop these products

Dewannain spent the last 18 years at TI, most recently as general manager of TI's custom ASIC business unit. He also served as the general manager of the communications infrastructure ASIC business unit, and general manager of the cable broadband communications business unit. Prior to TI, he worked as a circuit design manager on the Pentium design team and a senior design engineer on the 80486 design team at Intel. He has an M.B.A from the University of Phoenix and an M.S.E. E. from the Institut Superieur D'Electronique in France.

About Tensilica

Tensilica, Inc. is the leader in customizable dataplane processor IP cores. Dataplane Processor Units (DPUs) combine the best capabilities of CPUs and DSPs while delivering 10 to 100x the performance because they can be customized using Tensilica's automated design tools to meet specific signal processing performance targets. Tensilica's DPUs  power SOC designs at system OEMs and six out of the top 10 semiconductor companies for products including mobile phones, consumer electronics devices (including digital TV, Blu-ray Disc players, broadband set top boxes, digital still cameras and portable media players), computers, and storage, networking and communications equipment. For more information on Tensilica's patented, benchmark-proven DPUs visit www.tensilica.com.