San Mated, Calif. - Tensilica Corp. is claiming broad protection on the automatic generation of CPU hardware and compatible software development tools from an architectural description, based on two patents the U.S. Patent Office granted it last week. The announcement is likely to trigger a debate between the Santa Clara, Calif., vendor of configurable-CPU intellectual property and archrival ARC International (San Jose, Calif.) about the breadth of the patents, the existence of prior art and the process of configuring CPU cores and their associated compilers and assemblers. Another potential party to the debate may be the formidable legal department at Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, Calif.), in defense of pioneering work done at HP Labs. Vice president of engineering Beatrice Fu said Tensilica filed the patent applications in 1998 and 1999, early in the company's history. They were granted in recent weeks, she said.
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