NEW YORK -- Times are tough for communication chip vendorswho need to keep up, as a dizzying array of wireless standards continues toevolve at breathless speed.
Just when you thought you'd finally nailed LTE modemfunctions in your next generation of mobile SoC chips, here comes what?? LTE-Advanced.
Connectivity networks are also growing exponentially. In theWiFi realm alone, handling comfortable old friends like 802.11 n and802.11a/b/g/p is the fast track to the old folks' home.? As we speak, Broadcom is promoting -- heavily-- the emergence of 802.11ab.
So, what is to be done?
CEVA Inc is announcing today (February 21, 2012) a newfamily of "universal advanced communications engines," called CEVA-XC4000. It'sdesigned as an answer to chip suppliers serving the ever-growing cellular,broadcast and connectivity markets, under pressure to roll out newcommunication chips in a timely manner, while preserving investments in thedevelopment of generations of products, if possible.
Eyal Bergman, director of product marketing at CEVA, goes sofar as to claim that the CEVA XC4000 family supports "the most complete arrayof communication standards."
Let's break it down.
CEVA's XC4000 processors, while maintaining backwardcompatibility with the company's previous communication processors (i.e. XC321and XC323), are based on a single, newly designed low-power DSP framework.
The new XC4000 family, which comes in six differentprocessors, can cover a broad range of wireless and wired applications,according to CEVA.
They include everything from cellular (LTE-A, LTE, HSPA+,W-CDMA. TD-SCDMA, GSM/GPRS/EDGDE), connectivity (802.11ac, 802.11n,802.11a/b/g/p, WiFi Direct, GNSS, Bluetooth, Peer2Peer) to DTV demodulation(DVB-T/2, DVB-S/2, DVB-C/2, ISDB-T, ATSC, DTMB), and others such as WhiteSpace, MoCA, DSL, G.hn, PLC, and 802.15.4/g, according to CEVA.
Each XC4000 processor, which comes with a varying number ofvector units, is designed to be scalable. The variations range from a singlevector unit and 16 MACs to 4 vector units and 128 MACs. "Our customers can mixand match these different XC4000 processors to address a wide range ofcommunications markets," said CEVA's Bergman.
You might say that this is just the kind of"communication-centric DSP" pitch you'd expect to get from CEVA, a pioneer insoftware-defined radio (SDR). After all, programmability and flexibility inDSPs are the key to unlocking the conundrum of infinitely growing communicationstandards.?
But this time around, CEVA's pitch doesn't stop there. CEVAwants you to know that the company has taken a few roads significantlyless-traveled than with the company's previous communication processors.
First, the XC4000 isn't a single advanced communicationprocessor like XC321 or XC323 were.? TheXC4000 family is not just flexible but "it's also scalable," Bergman explained,thus making it easier for chip vendors to "scale up or down" their products'designs.
Second, CEVA's engineering team took extra steps to makenoticeable improvements in power management and die size in designing the newXC4000 architecture.
Bergman said the new XC4000 architecture features better"software and hardware partitioning." He pointed out that this is "trulyoptimized for power," thus making the family of XC4000 processors "highlycompetitive" with other communication chips on the market.
Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, finds XC4000unique, because of its ability to "provide greater performance at lower powerand in smaller silicon." He noted that XC4000 family, presumably offers "over50% silicon size reduction for LTE-A PHY, compared with CEVA-XC323 based PHY,both at 28 nm. The scalability among XC4000 family of processors is another bigimprovement over CEVA's previous products, in Strauss' opinion. But above all,the strength of XC4000 lies in its "improved power management capability overthe [CEVA's previous communication processor] XC323," he added.
Scott Gardner, a senior analyst at The Linley Group, agreedon the issue of power management. Gardner singled out "tightly coupledextensions" (TCEs) included in the new CEVA family of DSPs as XC4000's bigdifferentiator.
Gardner explained that TCEs "use hardware acceleration offunctions as a way to save power and CPU cycles." In his view, "This designapproach recognizes that customers want the best wireless baseband solution,and the DSP doesn't need to be as flexible for the algorithms" as they move intohardware.
How CEVA is winningthus farSo far, with its previous generation communication processorIPs, CEVA claims that it's picked up 15 design wins for LTE basebandprocessing. Among licensees are Intel, Broadcom, Mindspeed, Samsung, and NEC,according to Gardner. Forward Concepts' Strauss noted that Mindspeed last yearsampled pico cells based on CEVA's XC processor at the Mobile World Congress.
Gardner also believes CEVA has references design wins with atier-1 wireless infrastructure OEM, network processor vendors, and smart-gridchip suppliers, although he declined to speculate on who those companies are,or the production status of the designs.
There's no question that CEVA is "on a roll," as Gardner putit. He said, quoting CEVA, its DSPs were in 40% of the handsets shippedworldwide during 2011.
CEVA's total revenue for 2011 was $60.2 million -- up about34% from the prior year. Royalty revenue for 2011 was a record high $36.4million, representing an increase of 59% compared to $22.9 million reported for2010. Licensing revenue for 2011 was $20.2 million, an increase of 10% overthat of 2010.
However, there are still enough chip vendors out there,sticking to the hardwired modem blocks they pioneered years ago and milkingtheir lead.
It remains to be seen how many of those hardwired modemhouses, and those who compete against them, might eventually convert to CEVA'sXC4000.
Linley Group's Gardner believes it's just a matter of time.He said, "High-end standards are still changing too fast to support a hardwiredsolution. In many cases, a multimode, hardwired design would require multipleblocks of logic with very little reuse between operating modes. These extrahardware blocks add to the cost." He added, "With CEVA's approach, many of thelow-level algorithms have been baked into hardware TCEs, which gives them thebest of both worlds."
Asked why chip companies should consider licensing XC4000,Forward Concepts' Strauss said, "First, CEVA has the most experience inlicensing DSP cores than anyone else. Second, they have a good reputation forgood architectures and good support (including C compilers and developmenttools). Third, they have developed a good ecosystem of third party suppliers(hardware and software)."
If you are already a CEVA licensee with itsprevious-generation communication DSP cores, "you can continue to use thecompatible programming model and instruction set architecture you are familiarwith, while leveraging the same, CEVA-developed tools," said CEVA's marketingvice president Eran Briman. "Licensees can scale their products, whilepreserving their investment."
The "uncompromising" modem quality XC4000 offers should beanother draw for new licensees, according to CEVA. Gardner, in fact, pointedout the significance of higher precision arithmetic and uniquefloating-point-precision instruction set architecture (ISA) CEVA now offers inits XC4000. Its advantage is that it combines the benefits of floating pointprecision with fixed point performance and power consumption. "The use ofde-normalized numbers for addition/subtraction allows CEVA to speed upprocessing while retaining precision," Gardner noted.
Together with its XC4000 architecture announcement, CEVA isalso rolling out reference architectures for LTE-A Rel-10 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac(supporting up to 1.7 Gbps).
This story was originally posted by EETimes.
