Cadence announces Sensor Platforms as Tensilica HiFi audio partner

SAN JOSE, USA: Cadence Design Systems Inc. announced that the FreeMotion Sensor Fusion and Context Awareness Libraries from Sensor Platforms Inc. (SPI) are being ported to the Cadence Tensilica HiFi Audio/Voice digital signal processing (DSP) core. This software is scheduled to be available in the second quarter of 2014.

The FreeMotion Library interprets sensor data to determine the position and orientation of the device and the context of the user. The library provides sensor fusion, the algorithmic technique of combining the outputs from two or more sensors, to record a common event so that the fused result better captures the event than any single input.

This allows applications to get more reliable information from sensors and provides context awareness, which is a layer of algorithms on top of sensor fusion that interprets sensor data to deduce higher-level information. These algorithms determine a context even when users are not directly interfacing with their devices.

"SPI enables the next big step in mobile devices-the concept of always-on sensors that enable ubiquitous context awareness and, eventually, determination of user intent," stated Frank Shemansky, SPI's VP of business development. "The Cadence Tensilica HiFi DSP core lets device makers offload these functions from the applications processor, significantly extending battery life."

"The Tensilica HiFi Mini Audio/Voice DSP core is Cadence's smallest, lowest power DSP core for always-on applications," said Larry Przywara, Cadence's director of audio/video intellectual property (IP) marketing. "Companies like SPI have discovered that aside from voice applications, it is also a highly attractive applications-processor-offload DSP core for other always-on functions."