Tensilica, Inc. today announced that it has joined the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation, a not-for-profit consortium dedicated to developing architecture specifications that will unlock the performance and power efficiency of parallel computing engines found in many modern devices. Tensilica will contribute its years of experience assisting customers in bringing heterogeneous multicore SoC (system-on-chip) designs to market to the development and promotion of standards for parallel computing.

"Tensilica is a long-established leader in multicore technology, delivering unique solutions that enable both control plane and compute-intensive dataplane functions," stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica's vice president of product marketing and business development. "Tensilica customers today use multiple Tensilica processors for diverse functions such as audio offload, wireless baseband, image processing and general purpose control. We welcome the efforts and ambitions of the HSA to bring standards to the market that will greatly facilitate innovation in embedded applications."

"Tensilica is a recognized industry pioneer in dataplane processor technology and multicore solutions, and we look forward to their valued contributions to the HSA Foundation," said Greg Stoner, vice president and managing director of the HSA Foundation. "Tensilica's dataplane processors are widely used by the world semiconductor leaders, and by embracing the standards established by the HSA Foundation, can reduce time-to-market while improving both performance and power efficiency."

Tensilica's DPUs (dataplane processing units) are used in chip designs for smartphones, digital televisions, tablets, personal and notebook computers, and storage and networking applications. These DPUs are most often used to offload and accelerate the compute-intensive tasks from the main CPU. Therefore, developing an efficient heterogeneous system architecture is of critical importance to designers using Tensilica's DPUs.