NVIDIA GoForce 5500 Employs Tensilica's Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine for High-Quality Audio in Mobile Phones

SANTA CLARA, CA, – June 27, 2006 – Tensilica, Inc. today announced that its Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine drives the high-quality 24-bit audio processing in the recently introduced NVIDIA GoForce 5500 handheld graphics processing unit (GPU). The NVIDIA GoForce 5500 brings high-fidelity surround sound as well fluid digital TV, rapid multi-shot photography and console-class 3D graphics to mobile phones. Phones based on the NVIDIA GoForce 5500 handheld GPU are expected to be available from key handset manufacturers before the 2006 holiday season.

“We are delighted that NVIDIA selected Tensilica for this outstanding multi-core SOC chip design,” stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica’s vice president of marketing. “The engineers at NVIDIA realized that they could deliver high-quality audio by using our Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine and keep power requirements to a minimum to ensure long battery life.”

The Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine is an add-on package for Tensilica’s proven Xtensa LX processor, optimized specifically for today’s consumer audio functions. As a low-power turnkey solution, the Xtensa HiFi 2 Audio Engine enables system-on-chip (SOC) designers to quickly design audio-enabled devices such as mobile phone handsets, portable music players, DVD drives and set-top boxes. This 24-bit embedded audio processor has inherent advantages over common 16-bit audio processors in use today. It provides superior sound quality of compressed files due to the increased precision available for intermediate calculations in the compression and decompression algorithms. And 24-bit audio is fully compatible with all of the popular audio standards.

Tensilica and its application software partners also offer a comprehensive set of software encoders and decoders for all popular audio standards, including AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate speech), Dolby Digital AC-3, microQ from QSound Labs, MP3, MPEG-2/4 AAC LC and aacPlus^TM, WMA (Windows Media Audio), Sonic Embedded Audio Synthesis (EAS) and SRS WOW XT and Xspace 3D. Because the Xtensa LX processor with the HiFi 2 Audio Engine is fully programmable, multiple audio standards can run on the same hardware, allowing the same silicon to be used for multiple applications or the same device to play or record audio in different standards.

About Tensilica

Tensilica offers the broadest line of controller, CPU and specialty 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.