TriMedia is a family of very long instruction word media processors from NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors). TriMedia is a Harvard architecture CPU that features many DSP and SIMD operations to efficiently process audio and video data streams. For TriMedia processor optimal performance can be achieved by only programming in C/C++ as opposed to most other VLIW/DSP processors which require assembly language programming to achieve optimal performance. High-level programmability of TriMedia relies on the large uniform register file and the orthogonal instruction set, in which RISC-like operations can be scheduled independently of each other in the VLIW issue slots. Furthermore, TriMedia processors boast advanced caches supporting unaligned accesses without performance penalty, hardware and software data/instruction prefetch, allocate-on-write-miss, as well as collapsed load operations combining a traditional load with a 2-taps filter function. TriMedia development has been supported by various research studies on hardware cache coherency, multithreading and diverse accelerators to build scalable shared memory multiprocessor systems. Features 5 to 8 issue slots filled with up to 45 functional units 128 32-bit general purpose registers SIMD & DSP operations 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point operations 8/16/32/64 KB Instruction cache, 8/16/32/64/128 KB Data cache separate memory and peripheral bus interfaces up to 8 built-in timers up to 64 built-in vectored interrupts supported by an ANSI compliant C/C++ compiler toolchain History The first TriMedia was created in 1987 under the name LIFE-1 VLIW processor by Gerrit Slavenburg and Junien Labrousse. For the next several years LIFE was further matured internally in Philips under guidance of Gerrit Slavenburg, which resulted in 1996 in the introduction of the first Trimedia product: the TM1000 PCI Media Processor (introduced as TM-1 ). In 1998 the TM1100 and TM1300 (later renamed to PNX1300) products were introduced. In 2000, Philips spun out its TriMedia business to TriMedia Technologies Inc. (TTI) which was a pure “IP vendor”. TTI tried unsuccessfully to create a 64 bit next generation TriMedia CPU architecture. This venture was ill-timed, as it was right at the start of the Dot-com recession. In 2003 what was left of TTI was re-absorbed within Philips. In 2002, the TM3260 CPU was released in the PNX1500 Media Processor SoC. This CPU was the first of a family of modular Trimedia CPU cores with standardized interfaces that can easily be integrated inside Audio/Video SoC's. The TM3260 has found use in other NXP products, e.g. the PNX8550 Home Entertainment Engine. In 2004