Tensilica

Tensilica is a company based in Silicon Valley in the semiconductor intellectual property core business. It is now a part of Cadence Design Systems. Its dataplane processors (DPUs) bring together the strengths of CPUs and DSPs and custom logic with 10 to 100 times the performance, making them suited for data-intensive processing tasks.

The Tensilica brand is best known for its customizable microprocessor core, the Xtensa configurable processor. Other products include: HiFi audio/voice DSPs with a software library of over 125 codecs from Cadence and over 55 software partners; IVP Image/Video DSP, designed to handle complex algorithms in imaging, video and computer vision; and ConnX family of baseband DSPs ranging from the dual-MAC ConnX D2 to the 64-MAC ConnX BBE64EP.

Tensilica was founded in 1997 by Chris Rowen (one of the founders of MIPS Technologies) and was initially staffed by former employees of several other Silicon Valley processor and electronic design automation companies. It employed Earl Killian, who contributed to the MIPS instruction set, as chief software architect for several years. On March 11, 2013, Cadence Design Systems announced its intent to buy Tensilica for approximately $380 million in cash. Cadence completed the acquisition in April 2013, with a cash outlay at closing of approximately $326 million.