CEVA Announces its Most Powerful and Efficient DSP Architecture to Date, Addressing the Massive Compute Requirements of 5G-Advanced and Beyond

BARCELONA, SPAIN – Mobile World Congress - February 23, 2023 – CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA), the leading licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies and co-creation solutions, today announced its 5th generation CEVA-XC DSP architecture and its most efficient to date, the CEVA-XC20.

Extending the company’s leadership in DSPs, the new CEVA-XC20 is based on a groundbreaking vector multi-threaded massive compute technology that is designed to address next-generation 5G-Advanced workloads across a broad spectrum of use cases, including smartphones, high-end Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) devices (e.g. Fixed Wireless Access and Industrial Terminals) and a range of cellular infrastructure devices (e.g. base stations, virtualized DU accelerators, and beamforming compute in Massive MIMO radios). SoC and ASIC designers incorporating the CEVA-XC20 architecture can avail of its industry-leading power efficiency to design greener processors that are smaller and lower power, that in turn have a direct positive impact on the environment and society.

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Powerful vector DSP for 5G-Advanced Massive Compute

Dimitris Mavrakis, Senior Research Director, ABI Research, commented: “CEVA’s latest DSP architecture raises the bar for performance and power efficiency in 5G-Advanced cellular baseband processing, adopting a unique multi-thread scheme to address the challenging power, performance and area constraints when dealing with complex 5G scenarios. The CEVA-XC20 offers a compelling solution to any wireless semiconductor or OEM developing their own 5G-Advanced silicon, and can play a critical role in helping customers to address their sustainability goals in the process.”

The CEVA-XC20 architecture was designed in consultation with CEVA’s leading Tier 1 OEM customers, with the common aim of improving mobile network performance and power efficiency. The CEVA-XC20 solves the performance challenges posed by next-generation compute-intense 5G-Advanced by employing a novel Dynamic Vector Threading (DVT) scheme, which supports true hardware multi-threading, which up until now was only found in general purpose CPU architectures. DVT enables optimal sharing of vector resources between different execution units, resulting in an unprecedented vector utilization efficiency boost. This technique achieves optimal utilization of the VLIW architecture and improves core efficiency for common 5G execution kernels, as well as significantly enhancing use cases involving multi-component carriers and multi-execution tasks. This enables increasing the length of the vector processing units, usually consuming the bulk of the area in vector DSPs, while maintaining and even improving the execution efficiency relative to previous generations.

Guy Keshet, Vice President and General Manager of the Mobile Broadband Business Unit at CEVA, stated: “5G-Advanced and beyond promise ever-increasing cellular bandwidth and lower latency, while being greener and more energy efficient. This creates significant challenges for wireless device companies and mobile network operators who need to deliver on this promise. Our latest CEVA-XC20 DSP architecture addresses these challenges, leveraging more than 30 years of expertise in cellular DSPs at CEVA to deliver incredible power efficiency for the most intense baseband compute use cases. We’re proud to work together with our customers to constantly improve the cellular user experience while reducing the environmental impact of new technology.”

The first core based on the CEVA-XC20 architecture is the CEVA-XC22 DSP, supporting two execution threads using the groundbreaking DVT scheme. The CEVA-XC22 offers a 2.5X improvement in efficiency (performance per watt and area) for essential 5G use cases and computation kernels versus its predecessor. The CEVA-XC22 will also be integrated within CEVA’s holistic baseband platforms, PentaG-RAN for cellular infrastructure and PentaG2-Max for high performance mobile devices, wherein it will power CEVA’s heterogeneous compute platforms, including both DSPs and compute engine accelerators.

Availability

The CEVA-XC22 DSP will be available for general licensing in the second quarter of this year. CEVA-XC22 customers can also benefit from ASIC/SoC co-creation services by CEVA’s Intrinsix team to help integrate and support system design and modem development. For further information, visit https://www.ceva-dsp.com/product/ceva-xc22/.

About CEVA, Inc.

CEVA is the leading licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies and co-creation solutions for a smarter, safer, connected world. We provide Digital Signal Processors, AI engines, wireless platforms, cryptography cores and complementary software for sensor fusion, image enhancement, computer vision, voice input and artificial intelligence. These technologies are offered in combination with our Intrinsix IP integration services, helping our customers address their most complex and time-critical integrated circuit design projects. Leveraging our technologies and chip design skills, many of the world’s leading semiconductors, system companies and OEMs create power-efficient, intelligent, secure and connected devices for a range of end markets, including mobile, consumer, automotive, robotics, industrial, aerospace & defense and IoT.

Our DSP-based solutions include platforms for 5G baseband processing in mobile, IoT and infrastructure, advanced imaging and computer vision for any camera-enabled device, audio/voice/speech and ultra-low-power always-on/sensing applications for multiple IoT markets. For motion sensing solutions, our Hillcrest Labs sensor processing technologies provide a broad range of sensor fusion software and inertial measurement unit (“IMU”) solutions for markets including hearables, wearables, AR/VR, PC, robotics, remote controls and IoT. For wireless IoT, our platforms for Bluetooth connectivity (low energy and dual mode), Wi-Fi 4/5/6 (802.11n/ac/ax), Ultra-wideband (UWB), NB-IoT and GNSS are the most broadly licensed connectivity platforms in the industry.

Visit us at www.ceva-dsp.com

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