- What is Intellectual Property?
- What are the key trends in the semiconductor industry relating to DSP?
- What are CEVA’s IP offerings?
- What are CEVA’s target markets?
- Who are your customers?
- Who are your partners?
- Where is CEVA based?
1. What is Intellectual Property?
Within the semiconductor industry, CEVA is known as a Silicon Intellectual Property (IP) company. We focus on design and development of DSP cores and IP solutions that underpin chip design. We do not manufacture the chips ourselves; instead, we license our technology to leading semiconductor and OEM companies throughout the world, who, in turn incorporate our semiconductor IP into application-specific integrated circuits (“ASICs”) and application-specific standard products (“ASSPs”) that they manufacture, market and sell to consumer electronics companies.
2. What are the key trends in the semiconductor industry relating to DSP?
There are increased requirements to integrate DSP technology and associated DSP software within highly integrated, application-specific chips for high-volume markets, such as the cellular- and data-related products and mobile and home multimedia markets. Given the technological complexity of DSP-based applications and in order to shorten the design cycle time, there is an industry shift from developing DSP technologies in-house to licensing them from third party IP providers such as CEVA.
In addition, due to the rising chip design and manufacturing costs and the growing complexity of modern SoCs (System-on-Chips), there is a clear industry trend towards using programmable engines and software-based designs to address the broader communications and multimedia markets, where a flexible solution and the ability to quickly upgrade product designs through software is key.
3. What are CEVA’s IP offerings?
a) CEVA DSP Cores
CEVA markets a family of synthesizable, programmable DSP cores, each delivering a different balance of performance, power dissipation and cost, thereby allowing customers to select a DSP core ideally suited for their target application. The ability to match a processor to the application is a crucial consideration when designers select a DSP supplier. Our DSP cores are families of architectures, each largely software compatible, meaning that software from one core within the same architecture can be applied to another core, which significantly reduces investment in code development, tools and design engineer training. CEVA DSP cores are delivered in the form of a hardware description language definition (known as a soft core or a synthesizable core).
All CEVA DSP cores can be manufactured on any process using any physical library, and all are accompanied by a complete set of tools and an integrated development environment. An extensive third-party network supports CEVA DSP cores with a wide range of complementing software and platforms. In addition, CEVA provides development platforms, software development kits, fully-optimized software libraries and software debug tools, which facilitate system design, debug and software development.
b) CEVA Application-Specific Platforms
CEVA application-specific platforms are a family of complete system solutions for a range of applications. These application-specific platforms fundamentally reduce the complexity, cost of ownership and time-to-market for products developed utilizing these platforms. Platforms typically integrate a CEVA DSP core, hardware subsystem and application-specific (e.g. video processing) software. Our family of DSP-based platforms includes HD audio, HD video, imaging, vision and voice. We also offer platform solutions for Bluetooth and serial storage technologies (SATA and SAS).
4. What are CEVA’s target markets?
CEVA DSP cores and platform IP address three principal high-volume markets; mobile, digital home and networking & infrastructure.
a) Mobile – The Mobile market encompasses any battery-powered, handheld consumer electronic product that is portable. These include wireless handsets and smartphones, tablet computers, portable media players, and portable game consoles. In addition to audio, voice, video, and image processing, many of these products require mobile broadband and connectivity processing capabilities, where mobile broadband (also known as mobile Internet) refers to various types of wireless high-speed internet access (over GSM/EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA, LTE or LTE-A air interfaces), and connectivity including WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth.
b) Digital Home – The Digital Home is a broad term comprising all of the smart electronic devices within the household, enhancing and enriching the users’ experience. These devices include digital televisions (DTVs), set-top boxes (STBs), Blu-ray players, game consoles, and home media gateways.
c) Networking & Infrastructure – Today’s networking and communications systems involve a wide variety of wired and wireless technologies. Of particular interest are Wireless base stations, including femtocells, picocells, microcells, and macrocells. In addition to voice and data, many systems are seeing ever-increasing requirements for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and video, supported over the most recent HSPA+, LTE and LTE-A networks.
5. Who are your customers?
We license our DSP cores and application-specific platforms to leading semiconductor vendors and OEM companies throughout the world. These companies incorporate our IP into application-specific chipsets or custom-designed chipsets that they manufacture, market and sell to consumer electronics companies. We also license our DSP cores and application-specific platforms to OEMs directly. Included among our 220 licensees are the following customers: Actions, Beken, Broadcom, DSP Group, Entropic, FujiFilm, Fujitsu, Intel, Leadcore, LG Electronics, Mediatek, MegaChips, Novatek, Nufront, NXP, Renesas, Rockchip, Rohm, Samsung, Sharp, Sigma, Sony, Spreadtrum, STMicroelectronics, Toshiba, VIA Technologies, VIA Telecom, Yamaha and ZTE.
6. Who are your partners?
Long-term partnerships have been a cornerstone of our success both from a business and a technical standpoint. Today, we have more than 50 strategic technology partners that form a robust infrastructure around the CEVA DSP cores and platforms. You can view our complete
CEVAnet partner list here.
7. Where is CEVA based?
CEVA is headquartered in Rockville, Maryland. We have two principal development centers in Israel and Ireland, plus worldwide sales and customer support offices. For a full list of locations and contact information, visit our office locations page.
