Philson Licenses Taiwan’s Tensilica Xtensa Dataplane Processor Unit

Phison
Electronics Corp. the Taiwanese firm in flash and USB
controller technology, has licensed Tensilica
Inc. Xtensa
dataplane processor unit.

From high-end, multi-processor SSDs to
single-processor consumer flash, the Xtensa DPU combines both signal
processing and control, scales across multiple product lines and
delivers 10x to 100x performance required for manufacturers to
produce differentiated products.

"Tensilica’s DPUs allow us to
create highly competitive products that are optimized for our unique
flash architectures without compromising the implementation or
requiring us to create, verify and maintain algorithm-acceleration
offload engines to supplement an inflexible fixed-function control
CPU," said Aw Yong, president at Phison. "Moreover,
Tensilica’s DPUs have special I/Os that speed data in and out of the
processing engine, bypassing the system bus, speeding overall system
performance."

"We’re pleased to welcome
Phison, a leader in NAND flash memory and SSD controllers, as the
latest customer to realize the benefits of our Xtensa DPUs for
storage applications," stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica’s VP of
marketing and business development. "In flash controllers,
sufficient I/O bandwidth is critical in providing a balanced and
efficient solution. Processor performance alone is not enough if it
stalls waiting for data. With virtually unlimited I/O bandwidth,
custom data types up to 1024 bit wide and an instruction set easily
extended to match the needs of each application, our customers are
free to create exactly what they need for programmable signal
processing and control."