Tensilica Announces Design Center Agreement With Tata Elxsi Ltd.

New Authorized Design Center Will Provide Turnkey LSI Design Services For Tensilica Customers

SANTA CLARA, CA and BANGALORE, INDIA – November 14, 2005 – Tensilica, Inc., the leading supplier of configurable and extensible microprocessor cores, today announced an agreement with Tata Elxsi Ltd., a leading independent embedded design service company headquartered in Bangalore, India. Under this agreement, Tata Elxsi will become a recommended design center for Tensilica and Tata Elxsi’s engineers will be fully trained on Tensilica's Xtensa processor design technology. Tata Elxsi provides embedded product design services including hardware and software, for a number of leading global semiconductor and electronics manufacturers.

As part of the "Tensilica Xtensions Network," design center members have been authorized to assist Xtensa licensees with the configuration, implementation and evaluation of system-on-chip (SoC) designs.

“The partnership reflects our intent to support product development services with technologies that enable significant performance benefits and faster time-to-market across various verticals’” stated Mr. Madhukar Dev, CEO, Tata Elxsi. "Our turnkey SoC design capability and proven strengths in DSP and networking, coupled with Xtensa processor expertise, will help customers in the consumer electronics, multimedia and networking markets reduce product life cycle time and development costs.”

"As an established embedded design company with an international set of customers, we're very pleased that Tata Elxsi decided to join our partner network and provide Xtensa design services to its customers," said Larry Przywara, director of strategic alliances for Tensilica. "Having met Tensilica's high standards for an authorized design center, Tata Elxsi will now play a significant role in ensuring the broad and rapid proliferation of Xtensa cores in embedded applications."

About Xtensa

The Xtensa configurable and extensible microprocessor architecture provides a powerful, integrated hardware and software development environment with thousands of configuration options and an unlimited range of customer-specific extensions. The environment enables designers to carefully tune the processor for their particular application. With an easy-to-use graphical interface, designers can take advantage of Tensilica's processor generator to create customized MPU solutions with specialized functional and instructions. Because these instructions are recognized as "native" by a complete set of software development tools, developers can simultaneously tune both application software and processor hardware to meet specific speed, power and feature goals.

About Tata Elxsi Ltd.

Tata Elxsi Ltd. is an embedded product design services company, headquartered in Bangalore and part of the $17 billion (USD) Tata Group, India’s largest business conglomerate. Incorporated in 1989, Tata Elxsi has constantly provided high quality, cost effective and reduced time-to-market services and solutions across the product design lifecycle to industry sectors such as automotive, consumer electronics, media and entertainment, semiconductors, scientific instrumentation, networking and communications. This is enabled by a rich industry experience of more than 15 years, mature quality processes and methodologies assessed for SEI CMMi Level 5, core technology strengths and system engineering capabilities.

More information is available at www.tataelxsi.com

Tensilica was founded in July 1997 to address the growing need for optimized, application-specific microprocessor solutions in high-volume embedded applications. With a configurable and extensible microprocessor core called Xtensa, Tensilica is the only company that has automated the time-consuming process of generating a customized microprocessor core along with a complete software development tool environment, producing new configurations in a matter of hours. For more information, visit www.tensilica.com