Cadence Announces Sixth-Generation Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP for Voice AI and Immersive Audio Applications

Cadence has introduced the Cadence Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP IP, the sixth generation in its HiFi DSP family. The IP features a new architecture developed for next-generation voice-based AI applications and emerging immersive audio formats. The HiFi iQ DSP targets markets including home entertainment, automotive infotainment, and smartphones, where demand for higher SoC computational capacity is increasing due to advanced audio processing needs.

Compared to the Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP, the HiFi iQ DSP provides 2X greater raw compute performance, 8X higher AI performance, and more than 25% energy savings across most workloads. It also achieves over 40% performance improvement on multiple audio codecs.

Factors driving the need for increased computation include support for richer immersive audio codecs, higher sampling rates, object-based rendering, natural language processing (NLP), and automotive road-noise cancellation (RNC). These require enhanced AI/ML capabilities, low-latency audio/voice pre- and post-processing, and low-power on-device edge AI execution, particularly in power-constrained designs where raising frequency or adding cores is limited.

The new architecture includes enhanced auto-vectorization for programming and faster development, along with integr...