Tensilica Announces Design Center Agreement With Kaga Electronics

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

New Authorized Design Center Will Provide Turnkey SOC Design Services For High-Volume Consumer Applications

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and YOKAHAMA, Japan, November 5, 2002 – Tensilica®, Inc., the leading supplier of configurable and extensible microprocessor cores, today announced an agreement with one of Japan's premier design centers, Kaga Electronics. As a design services company to many of Japan's leading hardware and software consumer electronics companies, Kaga Electronics will assist these leading companies with Xtensa® core-based system-on-chip (SoC) designs for a variety of high-volume consumer electronics applications such as DVDs, printers and games.

Kaga Electronics joins a growing list of third-party companies that have joined the popular "Tensilica Xtensions Network." Design center members have been authorized to assist Xtensa licensees with the configuration, implementation and evaluation of SoC designs.

"We selected Xtensa because Tensilica is the leading configurable processor company," stated Masaji Mizukami, Engineering General Manager of Sales Promotion Div. for Kaga Electronics. "By providing Xtensa-based SoC turnkey solutions to our customers, we believe that we can increase our market share in the SoC business. It will be a big benefit for Kaga to have a good CPU platform solution as part of our design service enhancement strategy. We also are considering adopting Xtensa in our original brand LSI products in the future."

"As an established player in the high-volume consumer electronics market, Kaga Electronics has repeatedly demonstrated a reputation for design excellence, and placed itself at the top of the list with several recognized names in this space," said Larry Przywara, director of strategic alliances for Tensilica. "Having met Tensilica's high standards for an authorized design center, the company will now play a significant role in ensuring the broad and rapid proliferation of Xtensa cores in high-volume consumer applications."

About Xtensa
The Xtensa configurable and extensible microprocessor architecture provides a powerful, integrated hardware and software development environment with thousands of configuration options and an unlimited range of customer-specific extensions. The environment enables designers to carefully tune the processor for their particular application. With an easy-to-use graphical interface, designers can take advantage of Tensilica's processor generator to create customized MPU solutions with specialized functional and instructions. Because these instructions are recognized as "native" by a complete set of software development tools, developers can simultaneously tune both application software and processor hardware to meet specific speed, power and feature goals. 

About Kaga Electronics
Kaga Electronics has over 900 sales persons, applications engineers and software developers covering major consumer electronics and PC manufacturers. The company employs over 2300 people in 31 businesses worldwide.

Kaga Electronics, established in 1968, is a global distributor of electronic components and electronic sub-systems with offices in Japan, Singapore, Seoul, Taipei, UK and USA. The company also sells computer hardware under its own brand "TAXAN." Kaga also develops firmware and applications software for its customers. Since September 1997, Kaga Electronics became a publicly traded company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The company has its head offices in Tokyo, Japan. For more information please see http://www.taxan.co.jp.

About Tensilica
Tensilica was founded in July 1997 to address the growing need for optimized, application-specific microprocessor solutions in high-volume embedded applications. With a configurable and extensible microprocessor core called Xtensa, Tensilica is the only company that has automated the time-consuming process of generating a customized microprocessor core along with a complete software development tool environment, producing new configurations in a matter of hours. For more information, visit www.tensilica.com.

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Editors' Notes:

"Tensilica," "Xtensa" and "Sea of Gates" are registered trademarks belonging to Tensilica Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Tensilica's announced licensees are Agilent, Avision, Bay Microsystems, Berkeley Wireless Research Center, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, Cypress, ETRI, FUJIFILM Microdevices, Fujitsu Ltd., Hudson Soft, Hughes Network Systems, IC4IC, Ikanos Communications, JNI Corporation, Marvell (Galileo Technology), Mindspeed Technologies, National Semiconductor, NEC Networks, NEC Solutions, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), Olympus Optical Co. Ltd., ONEX Communications, OptiX Networks, Osaka & Kyoto Universities, TranSwitch Corporation, Trebia Networks, Victor Company of Japan (JVC) and ZiLOG.