High-quality audio creates an immersive experience that excites buyers and spurs the purchase of consumer products such as home theater and PC sound systems, flat-panel televisions, handheld and console video games, portable music and video players, and mobile telephone handsets. As a result, digital audio has rocketed to the top of the critical features list for all sorts of products over the past several years. At the same time, the number of digital audio codecs (coders and decoders) and audio-enhancement programs has exploded and most consumer products must support multiple codecs and offer a broad range of audio-enhancement features.

All of these factors have resulted in a high demand for a flexible, high-performance, low-power audio DSPs that add sound to an SOC's design with the least amount of design effort and a small on-chip footprint. Tensilica's HiFi Audio DSP[] family was carefully crafted to meet these requirements for the broadest possible range of consumer products. The HiFi 2 and HiFi EP Audio DSPs are available as an audio-extension packages for the Xtensa LX configurable processor core and the HiFi 2 DSP is incorporated into the pre-configured 330HiFi processor core.