Tensilica Inc. was a company based in Silicon Valley that developed semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) cores. Tensilica was founded in 1997 by Chris Rowen.^[1] In April 2013, the company was acquired by Cadence Design Systems for approximately $326 million.^[2]

Cadence Tensilica develops SIP blocks to be included on the chip (IC) designs of products of their licensees, such as system on a chip for embedded systems. Tensilica processors are delivered as synthesizable RTL to aid integration with other chips.

Xtensa processors range from small, low-power cache-less microcontroller to more performance-oriented SIMD processors, multiple-issue VLIW DSP cores, and neural network processors.^[3] Cadence standard DSPs are based on the Xtensa architecture.^[4] The architecture offers a user-customizable instruction set through automated customization tools that can extend the base instruction set, including and not limited to, addition of new SIMD instructions and register files.^[5][6]

The Xtensa instruction set is a 32-bit architecture with a compact 16- and 24-bit instruction set. The base instruction set has 82 RISC instructions and includes a 32-bit ALU, 16 general-purpose 32-bit registers, and one special-purpose register.^[7]

• HiFi Mini Audio DSP — A small low power DSP core for voice triggering and voice recognition^[8]
• HiFi 2 Audio DSP — DSP core for low power MP3 audio processing^[9]
• HiFi EP Audio DSP — A superset of HiFi 2 with optimizations for DTS Master Audio, voice pre- and post-processing, and cache management^[10]
• HiFi 3 Audio DSP — 32-bit DSP for audio enhancement algorithms, wideband voice codecs, and multi-channel audio^[11]
• HiFi 3z Audio DSP — For lower-powered audio, wideband voice codecs, and neural-network-based speech recognition.^[12]
• HiFi 4 DSP - Higher performance DSP for applications such as multi-channel object-based audio standards.^[13]
• HiFi 5 DSP - For digital assistants, infotainment, and voice-controlled products.^[14]

• Vision P5 and P6 DSP.^{[15][16][self-published source?]}
• Vision C5 DSP, for neural network computational tasks.^{[17][self-published source?]}

• AMD TrueAudio, available in select GPU products based on the GCN2 microarchitecture, integrates an HiFi EP Audio DSP on-die.^[18] Hardware integration of the DSP is dropped since GCN4, with TrueAudio Next switching to a GPGPU-based approach.^[19]
• Microsoft HoloLens incorporates a custom coprocessor fabricated on TSMC's 28nm process node, integrating 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has around 65 million logic gates, 8 MB of SRAM, and 1 GB of low-power DDR3 RAM.^[20]
• Espressif ESP8266 and ESP32 Wi-Fi IoT SoCs use respectively the "Diamond Standard 106Micro" (by Espressif referred to as "L106")^[21] and the LX6.^[22]
• Spreadtrum, licensing the HiFi DSP.^{[23][self-published source?]}
• VIA Technologies, using the HiFi DSP in an embedded SoC.^{[24][self-published source?]}
• Realtek standardized on the HiFi audio DSP for mobile and PC products.^{[25][self-published source?]}

• In 1997, Tensilica was founded by Chris Rowen.
• Five years later, Tensilica released support for flexible length instruction encodings, known as FLIX.
• By 2013, Cadence Design Systems acquired 100% of Tensilica.

The brand name Tensilica is a combination of the word Tensile and Silica, with the latter referring to silicon, the building blocks of modern integrated circuits.^{[citation needed]}

• Official website