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January 5, 2012
Tensilica HiFi Audio DSP Supports Dolby Volume to Eliminate Volume Fluctuations in Home Entertainment Systems and DTVs
Also Enables Constant Volume for Mobile Handset DTV
SANTA CLARA, CA, Jan 05, 2012
(MARKETWIRE via COMTEX)
-- Tensilica(R), Inc. today announced the immediate availability of Dolby(R) Volume on its popular HiFi Audio DSP (digital signal processors). The implementation is based on software developed by Dolby and has passed Dolby's certification. Dolby Volume enables designers of SOCs (systems on chips) for home entertainment systems and digital televisions, and for handsets with mobile DTV, to provide viewers with a consistent playback volume level across all sources and content.
"Viewers have been asking for a high-quality solution to the constant volume fluctuations encountered in commercial content, as they find themselves constantly reaching for the volume control to compensate. Not only do these constant changes distract from the viewing experience, they also bring the potential for hearing damage when using earbud headphones," stated Larry Przywara, Tensilica's senior director of multimedia marketing. "The Dolby Volume solution, optimized for our HiFi DSPs, ensures a reference-quality listening experience at any volume level."
"Dolby Volume on Tensilica HiFi Audio DSPs is an important addition to the wide range of Dolby solutions available on Tensilica products," stated Giles Baker, senior director, Broadcast, Dolby Laboratories. "As the number of designs based on Tensilica's HiFi DSP increases, we are looking forward to even greater adoption of Dolby Volume."
The technologies behind Dolby Volume, such as loudness-domain signal processing and auditory scene analysis, use advanced models of human hearing based on psychoacoustics, the science of human hearing. This makes it possible to correct source and content level differences without undesirable artifacts, such as pumping and breathing, introduced by previous compression and expansion techniques.
Dolby Volume also actively balances low, middle and high frequencies in each channel to compensate for the ear's changing sensitivity as the playback level is raised or lowered. As a result, the nuances and impact of the original mix are maintained even at low playback levels.
Tensilica's HiFi Audio DSP provides chip designers and system OEMs with proprietary audio processing algorithms with one hardware platform that efficiently runs the most audio standards, as well as proprietary audio enhancement algorithms. Tensilica, its customers and its partners have ported over 80 software packages to the HiFi architecture, so designers can pick the software they need for the application. As the market evolves and new standards are defined, they can easily and quickly be ported to the HiFi architecture, thereby "future proofing" the chip design.
"Tensilica's HiFi architecture is designed to be extremely efficient for applications like Dolby Volume," stated Michael Vulikh, CEO of P-Product. "HiFi's C-based programming model enabled us to quickly develop an optimized port and meet Tensilica's aggressive delivery schedule." Tensilica's audio partner, P-Product, did the Dolby Volume port.
About Tensilica Tensilica, Inc. is the leader in dataplane processor IP cores. Dataplane processors (DPUs) combine the best capabilities of DSPs and CPUs while delivering 10 to 100x the performance because they can be optimized using Tensilica's automated design tools to meet specific and demanding signal processing performance targets. Tensilica's DPUs power SOC designs at system OEMs and seven out of the top 10 semiconductor companies for designs in mobile wireless, telecom and network infrastructure, computing and storage, and home and auto entertainment. For more information on Tensilica's patented, benchmark-proven DPUs visit www.tensilica.com
February 8, 2010
CEVA Introduces Comprehensive Partner Program Accelerating the Development of LTE, WiMAX and SDR Wireless Communications Solutions
CEVA-XCnet™ brings together critical technology enablers for SoC design based on CEVA-XC™ processor
PRNewswire
SAN JOSE, Calif.
(NASDAQ-NMS:CEVA)
SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA); (LSE: CVA), the leading licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) platform solutions and DSP cores, today announced its CEVA-XCnet Partnership Program, a comprehensive network of strategic third-party technology suppliers that together form a robust infrastructure around the CEVA-XC communications processor.
The CEVA-XC processor is designed and optimized for high-performance, low power communications processing, targeting SDR solutions including LTE and WiMAX for mobile terminals and infrastructure. The CEVA-XCnet extends CEVA-XC's high performance and ease of programmability with a unique community addressing the different development needs of multi-standard soft-modem solutions.
CEVA-XCnet brings together companies with a variety of critical and complementary technologies: wireless software and hardware IPs for 3G and 4G applications, DSP software design services, RTOS, SoC level prototyping and simulation tools. CEVA-XCnet members gain in-depth understanding of the CEVA-XC architecture, development environment and libraries, and have a direct link to CEVA's internal R&D resources. Consequently, CEVA-XCnet reduces development costs and risks and significantly accelerates the development of advanced wireless communications solutions.
"CEVA has a long history of forging strong partnerships with industry-leading technology suppliers that enable our mutual customers to develop full featured SoC products that meet specific market needs. With the CEVA-XCnet Program we have taken this model to a new level, focusing specifically on the unique requirements of advanced wireless communications needs - LTE, WiMAX, HSPA+, SDR - and bringing together a wide array of expertise and technology that can be used to meet these very demanding development challenges," said Eran Briman vice president of Marketing at CEVA.
The initial partners in the CEVA-XCnet Program are:
ArrayComm, a provider of comprehensive LTE and WiMAX physical layer solutions for wireless infrastructure and client device applications. ArrayComm's Multi-Antenna Signal processing (A MAS™) software combines MIMO, beamforming, and interference cancellation to improve end user experiences and radio network economics.
Aricent®, a global innovation technology and services firm focused exclusively on communications and a leading supplier of end-to-end LTE software frameworks as well as telecom design, R&D and integration services. The company's library of over 125 licensable products, including communication modules and software stacks and pre-packaged frameworks jumpstart development cycles and help reduce design costs.
Carbon Design Systems, which provides virtual platform modeling design solutions. Its system validation solution for complex SoC designs provides critical components for accurate architectural analysis and pre-silicon hardware/software validation.
ENEA, a global supplier of RTOS and development tools for embedded applications. Annually deployed on over 100 million DSP targets, Enea OSEck is a full featured, compact, RTOS optimized to suit the specific requirements of high performance, memory constrained applications including single and multi-core devices.
IPG Communications, a provider of hardware and software communication IP and engineering services for mobile broadband. The company has developed advanced signal processing technologies for HSPA/HSPA+ for 3GPP standard release 8 with significant cost and power advantage.
Lauterbach, the leading manufacturer of JTAG debuggers and real-time trace tools. Highest quality, innovation and expert support have lead to Lauterbach's worldwide leadership in the JTAG and in-circuit-emulator market.
mimoOn, is the LTE pioneer in end-to-end software implementation and system design on SDR platforms. The company's scalable and modular 3GPP LTE infrastructure software families "mi!Femto™ & mi!Pico™" and terminal software family "mi!Mobile™" allows equipment manufacturers to fully exploit the numerous benefits of SDR.
P-Product, a CEVA certified software design center. It specializes in developing, optimizing and porting communications, audio and video algorithms and applications for embedded CEVA DSP platforms. P-Product has extensive expertise in LTE and WiMAX technologies
TurboConcept, originated as a spin-off from Telecom Bretagne where turbo codes were invented. It's silicon-proven wireless PHY Cores offer the best level of performance in terms of silicon cost and power consumption and support three PHY layer specifications: HSPA, LTE and WiMAX.
February 11, 2009
Tensilica Enables New Bluetooth Devices with the SBC Decoder and Encoder on Its HiFi 2 Optimized Audio DSP
Enables Easy Addition of Bluetooth Audio to Portable Devices
SANTA CLARA, Calif. USA – February 11, 2009 – Tensilica, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of the Bluetooth sub-band codec (SBC) decoder and encoder for its popular HiFi 2 Audio DSP, which can easily be integrated into system-on-chip (SOC) designs. Now designers of cellular phones, portable music players and other devices can easily design in Bluetooth capabilities, along with over 50 other audio standards already available, that run on the HIFi 2 Audio DSP.
“We’re seeing strong demand for high-quality Bluetooth capabilities in portable devices,” stated Larry Przywara, Tensilica’s director of mobile multimedia. “Our implementation provides CD-like stereo sound quality with very low CPU utilization for maximum battery life. The SBC decoder and encoder were ported by our partner, P-Product, and serves as a great example of the ease of programming the HiFi 2 Audio DSP fully in C.”
“We were very impressed with the efficiency of results we achieved by doing a quick port in C rather than in assembly language, as usually required with other audio processors and standard DSPs,” stated Michael Vulikh, P-Product’s CEO. “Tensilica’s C-compiler understood all of the optimizations made by Tensilica in this processor and automatically mapped our code to these extended instructions. Their toolset automation is one of the best in the business.”
Because the HiFi 2 Audio DSP is based on Tensilica’s programmable Xtensa processor, it provides chip designers with one hardware platform that can be used for multiple audio standards. Tensilica, its customers, and its partners have ported over 50 software packages to the HiFi 2 Audio DSP, so designers can pick the software they need for the application. As the market evolves and new standards are defined, they can be easily and quickly ported to the HiFi 2 Audio DSP, thereby “future proofing” the chip design. The HiFi 2 Audio DSP has been designed into chips for portable devices by five of the top 10 semiconductor companies.
Tensilica Processors in Bluetooth Applications
Tensilica’s application-optimized dataplane processor technology is ideally suited to the low-cost, low-power, yet high-performance needs of Bluetooth devices. For embedded control in Bluetooth devices and systems, Tensilica’s ultra-low power controllers, like the Diamond Standard 106Micro controller, are the ideal choice for minimizing silicon cost and power consumption. Leading IC vendors, such as Atheros, have already chosen to use Tensilica controllers in Bluetooth devices.
For the Bluetooth radio PHY layer, Tensilica DSPs can provide performance-power efficiency that is far superior to that achieved by generic, off-the-shelf DSP cores, because Tensilica enables designers to implement only the exact DSP functions needed without the extra baggage - and extra power consumption - of unneeded features. And now with the introduction of the Bluetooth SBC codecs, the complete Bluetooth audio capability can be integrated into a Tensilica processor solution.
Availability
The SBC decoder and encoder are available now from Tensilica.
December 2, 2008
P-Product Becomes Tensilica Authorized Software Design Center Providing Support for DSP, Audio and Video Implementations
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – December 2, 2008 – Tensilica, Inc. today announced that P-Product, of Needham, MA, has joined Tensilica’s Xtensions Partner network as an authorized software design center, specializing in efficient implementations of digital signal processing (DSP) software. P-Product has extensive expertise in audio and video as well as in WiMAX and LTE. P-Product has already ported multiple audio software modules to Tensilica’s popular HiFi 2 Audio Engine.
“As we completed our first port to the HiFi 2 Audio Engine, we were impressed with the ability of Tensilica’s cores to be optimized with custom instructions for complex signal processing applications,” stated Michael Vulikh, CEO of P-Product. “Tensilica’s automated tools let engineers add instructions directly to the processor, letting companies avoid the time-consuming work of adding specialized hardware blocks to general-purpose CPUs. And then these optimized instructions are automatically understood by the C compiler, so there’s no need for assembly language programming”
“P-Product has proven their ability and commitment to provide excellent software support for Tensilica’s customers,” stated Chris Jones, Tensilica’s director of strategic alliances. “Their expertise in wireless, as well as multimedia software, can help jump start design efforts.”
September 17, 2008
Tensilica Adds AMR WB+ Audio / Speech Decoder and Encoder to HiFi 2 Audio Processor Software Library developed in collaboration with P-Product
AMR Wideband+ Adds Support for Stereo Audio and Higher Quality Speech Support
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – September 16, 2008 – Tensilica, Inc. today announced that it has added the AMR WB+ audio / speech decoder and encoder to the software library for its HiFi 2 audio processor. The AMR WB+ (Adaptive Multi Rate Wideband plus) speech codec improves on the available AMR Wideband speech codec by adding support for stereo signals and higher sampling rates, providing higher quality at low bit rates.
“AMR Wideband+ takes the AMR Wideband speech capabilities into the quality levels of stereo music players,” stated Larry Przywara, Tensilica’s director of mobile multimedia. “We expect that our customers using AMR Wideband will upgrade to this enhanced standard because it allows them to mix speech and music in a low bit rate format. We collaborated with our partner P-Product on the development of the decoder and encoder based on the previously released AMR Wideband codec.”
“By utilizing the very efficient HiFi 2 ISA (instruction set architecture) and C programming model, we were able to quickly extend the AMR Wideband codec to incorporate the features of AMR Wideband+,” stated Michael Vulikh, P-Product’s CEO. “The achieved efficiency makes it ideal for portable device manufacturers that want one codec for stereo music and speech.”
AMR WB+ delivers high-quality music and speech between music, making it suitable for mixed-content audio applications such a mobile TV broadcasts, podcasts, multimedia streaming, 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Packet-switched Streaming Service (PSS),
Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS), IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) and other applications.
AMR WB+ is an open standard developed by 3GPP, a collaboration of telecom industry and standards groups in Europe for the development of third-generation mobile devices. Tensilica’s implementation has been specifically optimized to perform efficiently on the HiFi 2 Audio processor, requiring just 29 MHz for decode at 48 Kbps, 48 KHz.
Tensilica’s HiFi 2 audio processor is specifically optimized to efficiently run over 50 audio software packages, including aacPlus, MP3, SRS TruSurround HD, WMA, SPIRIT DSP’s Voice Engine, and the complete suites of Dolby and DTS codecs required for STB and Blu-ray Disc applications.
September 10, 2007
P-Product Joins Tensilica's Partner Network:
Ports Codecs to the HiFi 2 Audio Engine
SANTA CLARA , Calif. – September 10, 2007 – Tensilica, Inc. today announced that P-Product has joined its Xtensions partner network. P-Product has already ported audio software to Tensilica's HiFi 2 Audio Engine and has significant expertise in audio and video software porting.
“Customers interested in custom ports of specialized audio codecs can turn to P-Product because they have the expertise in programming Tensilica's HiFi 2 Audio Engine platform,” stated Larry Przywara, Tensilica's director of mobile multimedia. “With their porting and algorithm optimization experience, P-Product is a strong asset for our HiFi 2 customers.”
“The HiFi 2 Audio Engine is a very well optimized core for all audio functions, ranging from low-power MP3 to high-end surround sound,” stated Michael Vulikh, CEO of P-Product. “The audio centric instructions Tensilica created enable easy programming in C code, avoiding the time consuming assembly-level programming usually required when porting audio algorithms to the typical DSPs and CPUs. The HiFi2 audio engine allows us to deliver superior MHz performance with far less development effort.”
About P-Product
P-Product develops efficient implementations of digital signal processing software based on standard or custom specifications using algorithm optimizations and deep implementation optimization. The company has extensive experience in audio and video codec porting. For more information, see www.p-product.com.
About Tensilica
Tensilica, Inc., is the recognized leader in configurable processor technology and has leveraged that technology to become the leading supplier of licensable controllers and DSP cores for mobile audio and video applications. Tensilica offers the broadest line of controller, CPU, network, and specialty DSP processors on the market today – including full software toolchain and modeling support - in both an off-the-shelf format via the Diamond Standard Series cores and with full designer configurability with the Xtensa processor family. The modern design behind all of Tensilica's processor cores provide semiconductor companies and system OEMs with the lowest power, smallest area solutions for high-volume products including mobile phones and other consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications equipment, and computer peripherals. For more information on Tensilica's patented, benchmark-proven processors, visit www.tensilica.com.
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