Tensilica Education Kit Available Now

After the big success of the VLSI Fundamental: A Practical Approach Education Kit, the Cadence Academic Network is announcing the availability of the Tensilica Education Kit. The Tensilica Education Kit consists of five modules, which contain videos, PowerPoint lecture slides, and editable lab materials and files, which can be loaded in the Tensilica development environment. All Education Kits are optimized for use by lecturers and students.

The students will learn about Application Specific Standard Processors, where performance-critical parts of the algorithm can be optimized and accelerated by extending the processor with application-specific instructions. They’ll be introduced to Tensilica Instruction Extension language, which is how the application-specific instructions are created. After creation of the instruction, the processor core and the tool-chain need to be regenerated, the code needs to be recompiled, and rerun in the instruction-level simulator. Then, the profiler identifies performance-critical parts, showing where further optimization is required. After achieving performance goals, the processor core is exported to HDL code for synthesizing and digital place&route.

In order to run the labs, the lecturer and students must be members of the Tensilica University Program, which is free to join! To get access, please fill out the application form and send to universityprogram@cadence.com. Basic Verilog knowledge is required in order to be able to run the labs and solve the exercises.

Once students are signed up for the Tensilica University Program, they will get access to multiple cores, which are optimized for different tasks, like audio processing (HiFi-cores), image processing (Vision-cores), signal fusion (F-cores), and more. After completing the Tensilica Education Kit, deepen your understanding of different cores by taking advantage of the multiple free Online Training courses provided by Cadence.

The Tensilica Education Kit was developed using material created for the ASSP workshop at the DATE 2021 conference by Cadence in collaboration with Brandenburg University of Technology.

Go and download your copy of the Tensilica Education Kit today!