Tensilica

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Tensilica Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Semiconductor intellectual property core
Founded	1997
Fate	Acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 2013
Headquarters	San Jose, California
Key people	Chris Rowen, Jack Guedj
Products	Microprocessors, HiFi audio, DSP cores
Website	ip.cadence.com

Tensilica Inc. was a company based in Silicon Valley in the semiconductor intellectual property core business. It is now a part of Cadence Design Systems.

Tensilica is known for its customizable Xtensa microprocessor core. Other products included: HiFi audio/voice DSPs (digital signal processors) with a software library of over 225 codecs from Cadence and over 100 software partners, Vision DSPs that handle complex algorithms in imaging, video, computer vision, and neural networks, and the ConnX family of baseband DSPs ranging from the dual-MAC ConnX D2 to the 64-MAC ConnX BBE64EP.

Tensilica was founded in 1997 by Chris Rowen (one of the founders of MIPS Technologies). It employed Earl Killian, who contributed to the MIPS architecture, as director of architecture.^[1] On March 11, 2013, Cadence Design Systems announced its intent to buy Tensilica for approximately $380 million in cash.^[2] Cadence completed the acquisition in April 2013, with a cash outlay at closing of approximately $326 million.^[3]