The future market performance for an IP vendor licensing an IP based on a model with upfront fee plus royalties can be easily and safely evaluated if you look at the first part of revenue: upfront fee. Even if the royalty part is declining, exhibiting a 52% increase (Q4 2013 to Q4 2012) in upfront licensing fee is a promise that the future… Read More
Tag: ceva
DSPs converging on software defined everything
In our fascination where architecture meets the ideas of Fourier, Nyquist, Reed, Shannon, and others, we almost missed the shift – most digital signal processing isn’t happening on a big piece of silicon called a DSP anymore.
It didn’t start out that way. General purpose CPUs, which can do almost anything given enough code, time,… Read More
OpenVX Bring Power-efficient Vision Acceleration to Mobile
OpenVX is the next open source sample specification to be launched by Khronos group, a consortium building a family of interoperating APIs for portable and power efficient vision processing. If you take a look at the OpenVX participant list, you can check that the major chip makers: Broadcom, Qualcomm, TI, Intel, Nvidia, Renesas,… Read More
EDA and Semi IP Stocks in 2013: MENT, ARMH, CDN, SNPS, ANSS, CEVA, IMG.L
2013 was an up year for the stock markets as both the DJIA and the tech-heavy NASDAQ showed significant growth, so how did EDA and Semi IP companies do in the past 12 months? A quick stock plot from Yahoo Finance shows us that only two of the seven companies beat the NASDAQ: ARMH, MENT.… Read More
Why CEVA Is My Favorite Semiconductor IP Stock For 2014
As a full time financial writer/investor, I am always on the lookout for compelling risk/reward opportunities, particularly in small-cap tech. While the world of large-cap tech is generally well understood by the investment/analyst community, smaller cap names are usually under-followed and often misunderstood. One such… Read More
A Brief History of DSP…Not By Any of Us
I came across an interesting article by Will Strauss which is pretty much the history of DSP in communication chips. Having lived through the early part of the history while I was at VLSI Technology I found it especially interesting.
At VSLI, our first GSM (2G, i.e. digital not analog air interface) was a 5-chip chipset. The DSP functionality… Read More
Android Kit Kat Openly Preaching for DSP offloading
In fact KitKat advocates low-power always-on functionality, and this is essential for contextual-awareness. Always-on functionality is saving battery life, which seems to be weird at first: if your phone is always-on you would expect it to consume much power… But always-on goes together with screen-off (the screen is a high… Read More
Qualcomm start selling DSP IP core?…
In recent times semiconductor companies have revealed their intentions to license their in-house processor architectures for the first time – IBM want to license their Power CPU architecture, nVidia to license their GPU architecture. Most recently, a rumor has surfed: Qualcomm will license their DSP architecture. We should… Read More
CEVA-XC Wireless Baseband Core
Eyal Bergman of CEVA announced their latest core yesterday at the Linley Microprocessor Conference. It’s their 4th generation CEVA-XC solution, which is the core of their offering for wireless baseband. It builds on 3 previous generations of CEVA-XC’s that were mainly targeted toward handset applications. This… Read More
Base Stations Move Away From Fixed Architecture DSP
Handsets moved away from fixed architecture DSP some time ago, driven by two main factors. Fixed architecture DSP consumed too much power to get good battery life in the smart-phone era, but the consumer air interface was changing fast: W-CDMA, HSPA, WiMax, 3G, LTE (which is actually a whole ‘spectrum’ of different… Read More