ESP8266 Community Forum

Is there any Documentation on the Cadence Tensilica L106 Microcontroller, or is this proprietary ?

I've been digging around the internet for a couple of hours. It's frustrating and there doesn't seem like there's much out there. In fact if you Google for Tensilica L106, this page is one of the top results.

If you dig around you'll find out the so-called "L106" is just the name Espressif uses for the Tensilica Diamond Standard 106Micro (why would you rename it?).

Searching for 106Micro, the main result you get is an announcement page dating back for Nov 2007. What confuses me is why would Espressif release this chip in 2013 with an IP core dating back to 2007?

There's a very early thread on this forum dating back to around 2014 where there were a few users doing some of their own detective work around the Tensilica/Cadence core. Again, lots of guessing and not much reliable info. One guy posted what seems to be a link to the L106 on the Cadence website, which is now a dead link:

AJB2K3 wrote:Have you seen this document on the 106 micro?
http://ip.cadence.com/uploads/pdf/106Micro.pdf

I suppose we'll never know whether that was a datasheet, a reference manual, or a product brief?

Right now, all I can find on the 106Micro is this whitepaper from 2008, which is a very general introduction to the "Diamond Standard" processor family. It's basically just a product comparison and list of features.

AJB2K3 wrote:
Have you seen this document on the 106 micro?
http://ip.cadence.com/uploads/pdf/106Micro.pdf

I suppose we'll never know whether that was a datasheet, a reference manual, or a product brief?

Some googling led me to https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/issues/119 , which seems to indicate it's just a product brief:

Brief specs for the 106Micro core in particular: http://ip.cadence.com/uploads/pdf/106Micro.pdf ("The Diamond 106Micro has an iterative, multi-cycle (non-pipelined) 32x32 multiplier"... meaning that multiplies take more than one cycle? Note the MULL, MULUH, and MULSH instructions... interesting with regard to scale8? Though it looks like ESP8266 has only MULL perhaps. Though it also also MUL16, MUL16U, and MUL16S.)

So who was the dude that cooked up a c compiler for it if there is no datasheet for it? Maybe he's clairvoyant? Or Espressif bought the compiler from Cadence and just hasn't released any of it? Gee, I'm glad Intel released the datasheets for their processors.