Grant Martin Joins Tensilica as Chief Scientist; Well-Known SOC Methodology Expert is Critical Add for Tensilica's Long-Term Design Roadmap.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 21, 2004

Tensilica,(R) Inc, today announced that Grant Martin has joined the company as Chief Scientist. A well-known expert in system-on-chip (SOC) design methodologies, Martin is responsible for leading Tensilica's long-term SOC methodology roadmap.

"We're very excited that Grant has joined Tensilica," stated Chris Rowen, president and CEO of Tensilica. "His extensive, strong background in SOC design and embedded architectures will allow him to lead our future planning and development of products and methodologies."

"I'm joining Tensilica at an exciting time, with two critical product introductions coming up in the next few months," Martin said. "Tensilica has made significant investments in their processors to make them strong candidates to replace blocks of RTL. I look forward to working with these products and this group of innovative people to define and refine the roadmap for a comprehensive SOC design methodology."

Most recently, Grant Martin was a fellow and worked in the office of the CTO of Cadence Design Systems at the Cadence Berkeley Labs, concentrating on SOC design methodology and the links between SOC and embedded software. Over his ten-year tenure at Cadence, he held a variety of positions. He was the director of design methodology for Cadence's VCC hardware-software co-design technology and design tool development. He was Cadence's chief representative on several EDA (electronic design automation) industry and IP (intellectual property) design standards initiatives.

From 1984 to 1994, he worked at Bell-Northern Research/Northern Telecom in Ottawa, Canada, as a layout automation engineer, moving up to a manager of VLSI design systems. From 1978 to 1984, he worked at Burroughs Machines Limited, Cumbernauld, Scotland, concentrating on design automation and new technology and computer architecture.

Martin has published papers in numerous technical conferences and trade magazines and made many presentations at EDA conferences. He was co-author of Surviving the SOC Revolution: A guide to platform-based design, published by Kluwer in 1999 and System design with SystemC, published by Kluwer in 2002. He was co-editor of Winning the SOC Revolution: Experiences in Real Design and UML for Real: Design of Realtime Embedded Systems, both published by Kluwer in 2003. He has also contributed chapters or forewords to six other books.

Martin holds a bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

About Tensilica

Tensilica was founded in July 1997 to address the growing need for optimized, application-specific microprocessor solutions in high-volume embedded applications. With a configurable and extensible microprocessor core called Xtensa, Tensilica is the only company that has automated and patented the time-consuming process of generating a customized microprocessor core along with a complete software development tool environment, producing new configurations in a matter of hours. For more information, visit www.tensilica.com.

Editors' Notes:

-- Tensilica's announced licensees include Agilent, AMCC (JNI Corporation), Astute Networks, Avision, Bay Microsystems, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, Crimson Microsystems, Cypress, ETRI, FUJIFILM Microdevices, Fujitsu Ltd., Hudson Soft, Hughes Network Systems, Ikanos Communications, LG Electronics, Marvell, NEC Laboratories America, NEC Corporation, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), Olympus Optical Co. Ltd., S2io, Solid State Systems (3S), Sony, STMicroelectronics, TranSwitch Corporation, and Victor Company of Japan (JVC).

-- "Tensilica" and "Xtensa" are registered trademarks belonging to Tensilica Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.