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    Audio, not your father's MP3 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 04-24-2012 07:26 PM
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    Chris Rowen, Tensilica's CTO, presented in Santa Cruz at the Globalpress briefing. He was basically presenting Tensilica's audio strategy, which I've written about before. But he provided an interesting perspective. Globalpress (which flies journalists in from all over the world and then fills the few remaining empty seats with a few of us local guys) ...
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    LTE-Advanced Handsets for 4G 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 02-21-2012 05:00 AM
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    Due to a lot of somewhat aggressive marketing by carriers, you might think that 4G wireless is already here. After all, wasn't 3G ages ago? But in fact true 4G handsets won't really be available until 2015/6. But to make that schedule, first silicon needs to be available late this year or early next, to allow one or two turns as the systems go through 3 ...
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    HiFi audio...in all the devices 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 01-09-2012 04:00 AM
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    The big challenge with audio is that there are so many standards. Some of this is for historical reasons since audio for mobile (such as mp3), for the home (Dolby 5.1) and for cell-phone voice encoding/decoding have all had very different requirements, different standard setters and so on. But gradually everything is coming together. ...
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    View from the top: Chris Rowen 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 12-20-2011 11:41 AM
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    I met with Chris Rowen, CEO of Tensilica, last week to get his outlook on the year ahead.

    He gave me an interesting quote from his time at Silicon Graphics. “We wanted to be very fast in development not to be first to market but so that we could be the last to start.”

    A lot of what Tensilica does is bound up with evolving standards in audio, video ...
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    Not your father's Tensilica 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 11-14-2011 03:27 PM
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    Tensilica has been around for quite a long time. Their key technology is a system for generating a custom processor, the idea being to better match the requirement of the processor for performance, power and area as compared with a fully-general purpose control processor (such as one of the ARM processors). Of course generating a processor on its own isn't ...
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    Using Processors in the SoC Dataplane 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 11-08-2011 07:17 AM
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    Almost any chip of any complexity contains a control processor of some sort. These blocks are good at executing a wide range of algorithms but there are often two problems with them: the performance is inadequate for some application or the amount of power required is much too high. Control processors pay in limited performance and excessive power in order to get the huge flexibility that comes from programming ...
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