Tensilica and SPIRIT DSP Form Strategic Partnership and Deliver Mobile Multimedia Audio and Voice for Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine

Update: Cadence Completes Acquisition of Tensilica (Apr 24, 2013)

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and MOSCOW, Russia – June 4, 2008 – SPIRIT DSP, the world’s leading supplier of voice, audio and video software engines, and Tensilica,® Inc. today announced that they have formed a strategic partnership and can now deliver 18 optimized, high quality digital audio and voice software packages that run on Tensilica’s HiFi 2 Audio Engine, an increasingly popular audio architecture for system-on-chip (SOC) designs.

Immediately available, SPIRIT audio software packages include: AAC-LC decode and encode, aacPlus v1 and v2 decode and encode, BSAC decode, MP3 decode and encode, Ogg Vorbis decode, and WMA decode and encode. Voice codecs include AMR-NB (narrowband), AMR-WB and G.729AB.

In addition, under the strategic partnership the two companies will work on porting the full SPIRIT Audio and wideband Voice Engines to Tensilica’s HiFi 2 platform. The SPIRIT Voice Engine brings high quality real-time wideband voice and video to next generation VoIP equipment, such as Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), Video IP-phones, video conferencing terminals, IP set-top boxes, residential gateways and multimedia terminal adapters. Spirit’s Audio Engine is a popular, easy-to-integrate high-quality player/recorder solution for both mobile/portable audio and professional appliances. The SPIRIT Audio Engine is a comprehensive software solution supporting all popular music formats along with audio performance functions such as a parametric equalizer, loudness control, and channel mixing.

“Tensilica’s HiFi 2 Audio Engine is becoming the architecture of choice for adding audio and VoIP to a wide range of SOC designs, from mobile TV, phones, MIDs and other entertainment products to gateway and other VoIP terminal devices,” said Slava Borilin, SPIRIT’s VP of Products. “Our customers have been asking us to support SPIRIT’s Audio and Voice Engines on HiFi 2. With our collaboration, SPIRIT will deliver these engines for best-in-class audio and voice enabled devices.”

“SPIRIT DSP has an outstanding reputation for the quality of its complete audio and voice engine products. SPIRIT provides incredible power and memory efficiency that the mobile market demands” stated Steve Roddy, vice president of marketing and business development at Tensilica. “We are delighted that our HiFi 2 customers will be able to benefit from SPIRIT’s world-class audio and voice products.”

As part of the strategic partnership, SPIRIT has joined Tensilica’s Xtensions Network of partners. Tensilica’s HiFi 2 Audio Engine is a fully programmable processor core optimized for audio and voice applications, with a library of over 30 of the most popular audio software packages. Built on the full featured Xtensa 32-bit RISC CPU architecture it can also run operating systems, control code, and other functions.

About SPIRIT DSP

SPIRIT DSP (www.spiritDSP.com) employs 140 professionals, and has been in the international software licensing business since 1992. A bootstrap company, SPIRIT has been profitable for 15 years. For the last 10 years, SPIRIT's focus has been on voice, audio and video communication software products. SPIRIT counts among its customers Adobe, Agere, Arima, ARM, Atmel, Blizzard Entertainment, BT, Cisco, Compal, Flextronics, Ericsson, HP, HTC, Huawei, Importek, Korea Telecom, Kyocera, LG, MediaRing, Microsoft, NEC, Nortel Networks, NXP, Oracle, Paltalk, Polycom, Plustek, Quanta, Radvision, Reigncom, Samsung, Siemens, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Trinity Convergence, Veraz, ZTE and among 200+ other communication OEMs and software vendors. SPIRIT communication software is used in over 80 countries and powers more than 100 million embedded voice channels. SeeStorm is a SPIRIT affiliate for synthetic video conferencing.

About Tensilica

Tensilica offers the broadest line of controller, CPU and specialty audio and video DSP processors on the market today, in both an off-the-shelf format via the Diamond Standard Series cores and with full designer configurability with the Xtensa processor family. Tensilica's low-power, benchmark-proven processors have been designed into high-volume products at industry leaders in the digital consumer, networking and telecommunications markets. All Tensilica processor cores are complete with a matching software development tool environment, portfolio of system simulation models, and hardware implementation tool support. For more information on Tensilica's patented approach to the creation of application-specific building blocks for SOC design, visit www.tensilica.com.