The Semiconductor IP market has always been a big draw for SemiWiki readership and I expect that to continue. One of the more interesting companies we have covered over the past 6+ years is CEVA, who is now on Fortune’s 2017 100 Fastest-Growing Companies List. In fact, CEVA is the ONLY semiconductor IP company on the list and they join… Read More
Smart Speakers: The Next Big Thing, Right Now
There are many “next big thing” possibilities these days in tech but mostly behind the scenes; few are front and center for us as consumers. That is until smart speakers started taking off, led by Amazon Echo/Dot and Google Home. The intriguing thing about this technology is our ability to control stuff without needing to type/tap/click… Read More
Active Voice
Voice activated control, search, entertainment and other capabilities are building momentum rapidly. This seems inevitable – short of Elon Musk’s direct brain links, the fastest path to communicate intent to a machine is through methods natural to us humans: speech and gestures. And since for most of us speech is a richer… Read More
Webinar – Voice Interfaces of the Future
In our favorite Sci-Fi or fantasy movies or series we routinely expect voice-control of the many devices encountered in those stories. This seems natural because that’s how we most easily communicate our needs and intent (short of direct brain connections, though Elon Musk is apparently working on that). Typing on a keyboard … Read More
One Cellular Technology to Rule Them All
5G, the planned successor to earlier mobile network standards, holds all kinds of promise for new capabilities beyond LTE, but for a while seemed stuck in debate on exactly what the standard should cover. Several problems are apparent. A path to higher bit-rates is complicated because of spectrum shortage and fragmentation (plans… Read More
Webinar: CEVA on basestation design for 5G NR
Conventional wisdom is that 5G is still somewhere on the hype curve – expected to arrive someday but still not a near-term technology. As is often the case, conventional wisdom seems to be wrong. Coming out of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, semiconductor and carrier heavyweights have committed to accelerate deployment… Read More
Wireless 5G BTS Need Super DSP core… CEVA XC-12
Once upon a time, one wireless base station (BTS) was expected to support one, and only one wireless protocol, like GSM (2G), first deployed in Finland in 1991, or CDMAOne (also 2G) developed by Qualcomm and released through the TIA in 1995. Just a precision: the GSM modem speed was reaching 14.4 Kbps (with only 9.6 Kbps usable by end-user)… Read More
An Easy Path to Bluetooth 5-enabled SoC Design
Bluetooth (BT) was never a bit-player in communication but what surprised me is that is already dominating the market, at least as measured by radios sold, and is likely to extend that lead over the next 5 years. Particularly impressive is that BT already leads cellular and WiFi. This strength is certainly influenced by sales into… Read More
AAPl Vs QCOM Who wins?
Things just got interesting in the iPhone supply chain with the $1B AAPL Vs QCOM legal action filed this week. For the life of me I could not understand why Apple second sourced the normally QCOM modem in the iPhone 7. It caused quite a stir in the technical community but we could only surmise that it was a price issue on the business side.… Read More
Intelligent Vision in (almost) Every Application
Let’s take a look at the tremendous penetration of intelligent vision in so many and various applications. A few years ago, computer vision algorithms were implemented in applications directly linked with imaging, like computational photography for smartphones and cameras. We can mention today a bunch of segments like automotive,… Read More