CEVA's bright future

By Kenton Williston
October 16, 2007 -- dspdesignline.com
 
Last week CEVA announced that NXP was adopting its CEVA-Teak DSP core for its ulta-low-cost cellular solutions. The move isn't too surprising. After StarCore shut down and LSI Logic sold its DSP operations to ASIC house Verisillicon, CEVA was left as the only pure-play DSP licensor—at least as far as "general-purpose" DSPs are concerned. There are still many companies licensing specialized DSP cores (3Plus1 is one good example), but these competitors are generally much smaller than CEVA. This is particularly true in the cellular baseband market, where CEVA has a 53% market share. These days, CEVA mainly competes with chip companies like TI that have their own in-house DSP architectures.