Cadence Unveils Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP Purpose-Built for Next-Generation Voice AI and Audio Applications

Key Terms

dsp technical

A demand-side platform (DSP) is software that automates buying digital advertising space across websites, apps and video, letting marketers bid for and place ads in real time. Think of it as a smart shopper that compares many stores at once to find the best price and audience for each ad. Investors watch DSPs because their reach, pricing efficiency, data access and compliance with privacy rules directly affect revenue growth, margins and competitive position in ad-driven businesses.

ip technical

Intellectual property (IP) is the set of legal rights that protect a company’s ideas, inventions, brand names and secret methods—think of it as the recipes, blueprints and logos a business owns. For investors, IP matters because these rights can create exclusive advantages, produce licensing income, and increase a company’s value by preventing competitors from copying key products or brands. Strong, enforceable IP often signals a more defensible and potentially profitable business.

nlp medical

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables computers to read, understand and generate human language, turning written or spoken words into structured data. Investors care because NLP helps firms automate customer service, analyze news and earnings calls, mine market sentiment, and improve decision-making—much like giving a machine the ability to read newspapers and summarize what matters to a portfolio.

ai/ml technical

AI/ML stands for artificial intelligence and machine learning, software systems that identify patterns in data and make predictions or automate decisions, improving performance as they process more information. Investors care because these technologies can boost revenue, cut costs and create competitive advantages — like a factory that learns to produce goods faster and with fewer mistakes — while also introducing execution, ethical and regulatory risks that can affect a company’s value.

bf16 technical

bf16 (bfloat16) is a 16-bit numeric format used in computer processors and AI hardware to represent decimal numbers with less precision than standard 32-bit floats but with a similar range. Think of it as a compact shorthand for calculations that keeps the big picture while dropping some fine detail. For investors, bf16 matters because it lets chips run machine-learning workloads faster and with lower power and cost, which can improve performance and margins for companies that build or deploy AI systems.

llms technical

Large language models are advanced computer programs that read and generate human-like text by learning patterns from huge amounts of written material; think of them as digital employees that can draft reports, answer questions, summarize documents, or generate code. They matter to investors because they can change a company’s costs, speed of product development, customer service, and competitive edge — and they also create new risks and regulatory questions that can affect profits and valuation.

Sixth-generation HiFi DSP delivers greater performance and energy efficiency for voice-based AI applications and the latest immersive audio formats

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Cadence (Nasdaq: CDNS) today announced the Cadence^® Tensilica^® HiFi iQ DSP IP, the sixth generation of its highly successful HiFi DSP family, based on a new architecture purpose-built for next-generation voice AI and emerging immersive audio. As these applications proliferate in the home entertainment, automotive infotainment and smartphone markets, the HiFi iQ DSP delivers the performance and energy efficiency required to meet growing SoC computational demands. Compared to the industry-leading Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP, the HiFi iQ DSP offers 2X greater compute performance, 8X higher AI performance and more than 25% energy savings for most workloads—delivering over 40% performance uplift on numerous audio codecs.

As next-generation voice AI and emerging immersive audio applications proliferate in the home entertainment, automotive infotainment and smartphone markets, the Cadence Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP delivers the performance and energy efficiency required to meet growing SoC computational demands.

“With the increased growth of AI across virtually every facet of the industry, audio and language have become critical interfaces for users,” said Anshel Sag, VP and principal analyst, Moor Insights and Strategy. “The AI performance and energy savings with Cadence’s new flagship Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP position it to enable future AI-enhanced applications and offload processing from other IPs.”

A number of factors are driving the need for greater computation, including the need for richer experiences enabled by the latest immersive audio codecs, audio processing at higher sampling rates, object-based rendering, seamless natural language processing (NLP), and automotive road-noise cancellation (RNC). These usages require increased AI/ML capabilities and enhanced audio/voice pre- and post-processing functions, which demand more computations performed with low latency and low power for on-device processing in edge AI and physical AI applications. Since most of these designs are power constrained, increasing the core’s operating frequency or integrating multiple cores is often not a viable option.

Leveraging more than two decades developing audio solutions and expertise in instruction-set optimization, Cadence has developed a new architecture specifically designed for AI-enhanced, high-performance audio workloads. The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP addresses the latest audio market trends, delivering significant improvements over the Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP:

• 2X greater raw compute performance and 8X higher AI performance for compute-intensive advanced audio standards
• More than 25% energy savings across various workloads for very energy-efficient on-device AI processing
• Enhanced auto-vectorization for easy programming and fast time to market
• Integrated support for FP8, BF16 and other formats to run cutting-edge voice AI models

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP’s architectural enhancements and increased computational capability enable sophisticated immersive audio codecs such as Dolby MS12, Eclipsa Audio, Opus HD, Audio Vivid and others to run with higher efficiency than on previous HiFi DSPs. Cadence has already demonstrated more than 40% greater performance than the Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP on multiple codecs. Signal processing algorithms for keyword spotting (KWS), active noise cancellation (ANC), beamforming and automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be performed seamlessly, enabling state-of-the-art NLP functions. Additionally, multi-stream and multi-channel audio playback facilitates rendering of 3D spatial zones and sound bubbles, delivering highly realistic listening experiences.

“With recent advancements in LLMs, SLMs, energy-efficient SoCs and on-device AI, voice input is poised to become the new keyboard. To enable seamless interaction with the latest physical AI applications, SoC providers need energy-efficient and easily programmable IP capable of running SLMs on-device while performing voice and audio processing seamlessly,” said Boyd Phelps, senior vice president and general manager of the Silicon Solutions Group at Cadence. “As the market leader in DSPs for audio, voice, speech and AI applications with billions of Tensilica HiFi DSPs in a wide array of embedded products, SoC and system vendors rely on Cadence to continue to push the envelope for performance and energy efficiency.”

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP is fully capable of running popular small language models (SLMs) and large language models (LLMs) on the DSP itself, acting as an all-in-one AI processor for voice AI applications. For an additional performance boost, it can be easily paired with Cadence’s Neo^™ NPUs or customer-built NPUs to further maximize performance and energy efficiency.

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP is compatible with the Cadence NeuroWeave^™ Software Development Kit (SDK), TensorFlow Lite for Micro (TFLM), LiteRT and ExecuTorch environments for AI model execution. The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP also leverages the vast ecosystem of partners and OEMs that have developed software libraries, compilers, codec packages, frameworks and more to enable easy deployment and fast time to market.

Customer and Partner Support

To see what audio partners and customers are saying about the new Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP, please visit this quote sheet.

Availability and Related Resources

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP will be available to lead customers and partners in the first quarter of 2026, with general availability expected in the following quarter. The HiFi iQ DSP is also targeted for ISO 26262 functional safety (FUSA) certification, making it suitable for safety-critical applications. Future HiFi iQ DSP support for cache-coherent multicore configurations is planned.

• White Paper: Voice is the New UI
• Video: Powering Next-Gen Voice AI and High-Performance Audio
• Product Brief: Tensilica HiFi DSP Family
• Product Webpage: HiFi iQ DSP

About Cadence

Cadence is a market leader in AI and digital twins, pioneering the application of computational software to accelerate innovation in the engineering design of silicon to systems. Our design solutions, based on Cadence’s Intelligent System Design^™ strategy, are essential for the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies to build their next-generation products from chips to full electromechanical systems that serve a wide range of markets, including hyperscale computing, mobile communications, automotive, aerospace, industrial, life sciences and robotics. In 2024, Cadence was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s top 100 best-managed companies. Cadence solutions offer limitless opportunities—learn more at www.cadence.com.

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Source: Cadence Design Systems, Inc.