He clicks on the company's Web site and goes to the "processor generator."Selecting from a menu, he gives the chip a name, "Thursday noon," and goesto work. He picks a speed of 130 megahertz. One by one he adds features, asif he were putting condiments on a hamburger -- albeit one where he gets tochoose his own secret sauce.

A pop-up message warns Mr. Greenberg if he tries to put an incompatiblecomponent into the chip. At the bottom of the computer screen, an indicatorbar tells him if the features will make the chip slower or more costly. Withhis last click, the automated software takes over. In one hour, it generatesthe detailed blueprints needed for a contract manufacturer to make thechip.

This is the new world of user-configurable microprocessors. Once theprovince of an exclusive priesthood of engineers, microprocessor design isbeing simplified and opened to the masses of product designers who use chipsin everything from dishwashers to satellites.

Thanks to Tensilica (www.Tensilica.com) and rivals such as Arc Cores Ltd. inLondon and Production Languages Corp. in Fort Worth, Texas, these systemdesigners can now mold the microprocessors to their products -- rather thanmolding their products around an existing chip in a much shorter time thanif they went to a traditional custom-chip maker.

"With us, all of the believers can be priests," says Chris Rowen, chiefexecutive of Tensilica, a closely held company that has raised $33 millionin venture capital.

The basic question
Why would people want to design their own microprocessor? After all, theycan already choose from the more than 20 chip families that address theso-called embedded market, where chips are used in noncomputer devices fromtoasters to cellular phones.

The problem is that product cycles are shortening to the point where adigital-camera model might last just six months before it is replaced by anew one. The old method of using lots of engineers to design a custommicroprocessor takes too long.

By automating the chip-design process, the upstarts are cutting design costswithout affecting the quality and cost of the final product.

Better yet, Mr. Rowen says, because system designers can configure thesechips however they want, customers can still differentiate their chips withunique instructions or other proprietary technology that gives them an edgeover rivals. For instance, by adding digital-signal processing instructionsto a microprocessor, Tensilica could eliminate the need for a DSP chip,resulting in a chip that could be useful for a wide range of communicationsapplications.

Jumping in `whole hog'
Using Tensilica's software can cut chip development to six months from 18,says Luis Larzabal, director of DSP products at Zilog Inc., a Campbell,Calif., chip maker. Zilog plans to come up with a line of Tensilica-baseddigital-signal processors for products such as digital cameras and cellularphones in the fourth quarter.

"We are jumping whole hog into this arena," Mr. Larzabal says. Other largecompanies are taking notice. Tensilica raised $20 million in July from anumber of venture capitalists as well as networking giant Cisco SystemsInc., chip maker Altera Corp. and Japanese conglomerate Matsushita ElectricIndustrial Co.

While it has competition among the many chip makers that offer various waysto customize chips, Tensilica carries with it a prominent pedigree. Mr.Rowen, 42 years old, was an early proponent of so-calledreduced-instruction-set computing in the 1980s while studying at StanfordUniversity under computing pioneer John Hennessey. Mr. Rowen led much of thechip development at Mips Computer Inc. After Silicon Graphics Inc. acquiredMips in 1992, Mr. Rowen became its top technologist in Europe.

Mr. Rowen returned to Silicon Valley in 1996 to spend a year at SynopsysInc., a maker of software used to create chips. It was there that he saw thelogic of designing chips in a highly automated fashion. Synopsys hadperfected the art of "synthesis," or taking a high-level description of amicroprocessor created by a chip designer and translating it to the kind ofcode that can be used to manufacture the chip. Aiming to build on thosemethods, Mr. Rowen founded Tensilica in July 1997, and began recruitingwell-known engineers from Stanford University and companies such as Mips,Intel Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Synopsys. Mr. Hennessey, now provostat Stanford, invested in the company and sits on its board of advisors.

Tensilica is also leading in one key advantage to its customers: Itssoftware can automatically create tools for testing and debugging a customchip, and those tools are compatible with tools used to create the rest ofthe system. "That means that the microprocessor can immediately be testedagainst the software that is supposed to run on it," says Handel Jones, ananalyst at International Business Strategies Inc. in Los Gatos, Calif.

"So hardware and software people can work on the system at the same time,rather than wait for a hardware prototype to be finished.