Tensilica Enables Single Audio Core Blu-ray Disc Player SOCs

Major semiconductor companies are already using the HiFi 2 Audio DSP for Blu-ray Disc SOCs (system-on-chips). Blu-ray Disc players require up to 7.1-channel audio, including Secondary Audio to support interactive content and directors commentary, higher resolution compressed audio streams for enhanced audio reproduction, and lossless audio format that provide bit-for-bit identical reproduction of the original studio master up to 7.1 channels.

New codecs have been developed and introduced by Dolby and DTS to support these audio capabilities, including Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio. Because of the higher complexity of these new codecs, plus support for simultaneous Secondary Audio decoding and mixing of primary and secondary audio and effects, there’s been a huge step function increase in audio signal processing requirements compared to the legacy DVD standard.

The HiFi 2 Audio DSP meets these processing challenges with extremely efficient implementations of all the mandatory and optional Dolby and DTS codecs. The worst case combination audio workload for a Blu-ray Disc player can run on a single HiFi2 DSP core in mainstream 65 nm processes. Other DSP core providers offer solutions that can only handle part of the entire Blu-ray workload in a single DSP core, thus SOCs must contain multiple cores from these other vendors – with increased cost of ten cents or more per chip plus added power consumption – to deliver a full Blu-ray solution.