Tensilica announces strategic investment by Fujitsu

SANTA CLARA, USA: Tensilica Inc. announced that Fujitsu Ltd has made a strategic investment in Tensilica.

Tensilica is a major semiconductor IP (intellectual property) supplier specializing in dataplane processor (DPU) cores, which are a combination of CPUs (central processing unit) and DSPs (digital signal processor) that can be rapidly customized to provide 10 to 100x the performance of standard CPUs and DSPs.

Tensilica's DPUs are widely used in system-on-chip (SOC) designs for signal processing in mobile wireless, home entertainment and other applications.

"After working with Tensilica on the development of advanced performance on our mobile terminals we realized how important Tensilica's DPU foundation has become to our engineers," stated Minoru Sakata, President, Mobile Phones Unit, Fujitsu.

"Tensilica's customizable DPUs help us get maximum performance with the lowest possible power in high throughput, signal processing-intensive mobile wireless devices."

"We've been working with the best engineers at Fujitsu for over two years as they've been designing their LTE products for next-generation mobile phones," stated Jack Guedj, Tensilica's president and CEO.

"We are honored that Fujitsu has decided to make a strategic investment in Tensilica out of its corporate venture capital fund due to our strong DPU semiconductor IP for LTE baseband modem, audio processing and many other applications in advanced mobile phones. We will be working closely with them to find other chip design projects that can benefit from our technology."

Tensilica's DPUs range from small, micro control and signal processor to powerful benchmark-topping, yet very efficient DSPs. Tensilica has used its own Xtensa DPU foundation to quickly develop and optimize DPUs for audio, baseband and other signal processing applications that have been designed into millions of cellular phone handsets.