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 US
: CEVA, Inc. announced the release of a pioneering new DSP architecture
called CEVA-X that offers best-in-class performance, scalability and
lowest cost-of-development in DSP deployment. The first implementation
of the CEVA-X architecture, the CEVA-X1620, is a dual MAC 16-bit fixed
point DSP that has already been licensed to one of the world's top cellular
companies to power their next generation 3G multimedia phones.
"The DSP market is growing at a rate of 25% annually, and CEVA
has positioned itself to capture an increased share of the market by
delivering an architecture that hits new levels of performance, power
efficiency and scalability," said Will Strauss, President of Forward
Concepts, a leading electronics market research firm. "The ability
of CEVA-X licensees to deploy code-compatible cores to each market's
particular characteristics is impressive because it eliminates the time,
cost and expense associated with adoption of new DSP technology for
each one. CEVA's licensees now have a clear migration path within a
unified architecture."
The CEVA-X architecture combines Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP)
with configurable two, four or eight MAC options, 16 or 32-bit data
word, 16 or 32 instruction set, and the capability to extend the instruction
set with customer defined co-processors. CEVA-X's innovative reusable
architecture gives customers complete deployment flexibility within
a unified architecture roadmap.
CEVA-X was designed as a fully synthesizable solution (soft-core) allowing
licensees to customize DSPs to individual markets with complete flexibility
in terms of cost, power consumption, clock speed, foundry and process.
CEVA-X DSP cores are supplied with a complete design flow allowing the
licensee to run cost/performance analysis in rapid-time. CEVA-X also
counters the escalating costs of SoC design with the industry's first
truly compiler-driven architecture, enabling designers to write in high-level
languages such as C and C++ and thereby slash development cost and time-to-market.
Licensees are fully supported with complete tools and development environment.
CEVA-X's market-leading performance has been confirmed in independent
benchmarks by Berkeley Design Technology (BDTI), which showed that the
CEVA-X (X1620 implementation) will be faster than all DSPs in its class.*
CEVA-X family of DSP cores' performance capabilities opens a wealth
of new markets for programmable DSP technology, including software radio,
3G multimedia phones, multimedia (e.g. H264) processing, VoIP gateways,
broadband modems, and home entertainment products such as DVD, digital
TV, personal video recorders and set-top boxes.
"CEVA-X is a groundbreaking technology bringing unprecedented performance
and scalability to DSP, and a vital component of our product portfolio
that gives our customers a complete end-to-end DSP solution," said
Chet Silvestri, CEO of CEVA, Inc. "With the early adoption by one
of the world's leading cellular companies, we are confident that CEVA-X
will play a key role in helping us reinforce and consolidate our position
as a global DSP leader."
Key features of the new CEVA-X architecture include:
Scalability, based on the ability to use the same software code and
other infrastructure components with 2, 4 and 8 MAC units, those supporting
16- and 32-bit instruction widths, and multiple memory architecture
subsystems. Up to eight instruction sets can be issued in parallel utilizing
four different computation clusters, enabling up to 11 billion instructions
per second.
High performance, achieved through a unique mix of Very Long Instruction
Word (VLIW) and Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architectures.
For example, CEVA-X1620 performs 12 times faster than CEVA's own Teak
DSP.
Support for high-level C/C++ programming, coupled with the use of a
highly efficient optimizing compiler that dramatically reduces development
time as well as permitting code to be ported from another DSP core quickly
and efficiently.
Extendibility, enabling licensees to tailor products to their specifications
by adding proprietary instructions and functions with an open-instruction
customizable format. This permits the development of customized and
differentiated products while using a standard DSP platform.
A complete Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tool chain for both
hardware and software development, including a compiler, simulator,
debugger, profiler, assembler, linker and DSP libraries, different modular
development system boards, a DMA controller, CPU interfaces, and multiple
peripherals and interfaces.
Ultra-low dynamic power consumption, achieved by built-in dynamic sleep
mode mechanisms.
Enhanced by CEVA's portfolio of DSP Centric-IP, including the Xpert
Open Framework environment that enables plug-and-play with CEVA Xpert
Applications including multimedia (audio, image, video), GPS, VoIP,
Bluetooth, and high-speed serial communications.
The release of the CEVA-X architecture and the CEVA-X1620 coincides
with a corporate name change from ParthusCeva, Inc., to CEVA, Inc.,
that was announced separately today. CEVA will be hosting a CEVA-X online
technical seminar tomorrow Tuesday December 9th at 10am EST. Visit www.techonline.com
for the live or archived presentation.
CEVA-X1620 Features
16-bit Fixed-Point Dual MAC CEVA-X architecture
Unique mix of Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) and Single Instruction
Multiple Data (SIMD)
High frequency - up to 450 Mhz @ 0.13u worst case process
High DSP performance. For example:
2 cycle FFT butterfly
Single cycle Viterbi Add-compare-select
Up to 8 instructions in parallel
Variable instruction width (16 or 32-bit) and variable instruction packets
Allows integration of Customer-defined Extensions
Highly efficient C/C++ Compiler
Complete set of software and hardware development tools chain
About CEVA, Inc.
Headquartered in San Jose, CEVA (NASDAQ: CEVA and LSE: CVA) is the leading
licensor of DSP cores and integrated applications to the semiconductor
industry. CEVA markets a portfolio of DSP IP in three integrated areas:
CEVA DSPs; CEVA-Xpert Open Framework Environment; CEVA-Xpert Applications;
supported by Xpert-Integration services.
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