CEVA Announced the Most Powerful DSP Architecture

8 March, 2020

The Gen4 CEVA-XC architecture unifies the principles of scalar processing and vector processing. CEVA indicated that it had already won the first costumer, using XC16 to develop a 5G networking chip

Photo above: Block diagram of CEVA’s Gen4 CEVA-XC architecture

CEVA announced a new DSP architecture, Gen4 CEVA-XC, which the company sais “is the world’s most powerful DSP architecture, delivering unmatched performance for the complex parallel processing workloads required for 5G endpoints and Radio Access Networks (RAN), enterprise access points and other applications.”

The Gen4 CEVA-XC unifies the principles of scalar processing and vector processing, enabling two-times 8-way VLIW and up to an unprecedented 14,000 bits of data level parallelism. It incorporates a deep pipeline architecture enabling operating speeds of 1.8 GHz at a 7nm process node. This allows the processors to be dynamically reconfigured as either a wide SIMD machine, or to be divided into smaller simultaneous SIMD threads.

The Gen4 CEVA-XC architecture also features a novel memory subsystem, using 2048-bit memory bandwidth, with coherent, tightly-coupled memory to support efficient simultaneous multithreading and memory access. The first processor based on the Gen4 CEVA-XC architecture is the multicore CEVA-XC16. According to CEVA, “this is the fastest DSP ever made” .

Work Horse for 5G, Radar and LiDAR

It is targeted for use in different form factors of 5G RAN architectures, including Open RAN (O-RAN), Baseband Unit (BBU) aggregation as well as Wi-Fi and 5G enterprise access points. It also applicable to massive signal processing and AI workloads needed for base station operation.

Beside 5G, the XC16 processor is well adapted for other heavyduty computation workloads, such as Radar and LiDAR. CEVA indicated that it had already won the first costumer, using XC16 to develop a new chip for 5G networking solution. Availability for general licensing will start in Q2 2020.

“5G growth vectors span consumer, industrial, telecom and AI,” said Aviv Malinovitch, General Manager of the Mobile Broadband Business Unit at CEVA. “The CEVA-XC16 DSP helps to substantially reduce the entry barriers for OEMs and semiconductor vendors looking to benefit from the growing 5G Capex and Open RAN network architectures.”

CEVA is a licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies: Digital Signal Processors, AI processors, wireless platforms and complementary software for sensor fusion, image enhancement, computer vision, voice input and artificial intelligence. Its total revenue for 2019 was $87.2 million, an increase of 12%, when compared to $77.9 million reported for 2018.

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Posted in: News , Semiconductors , Wireless

Posted in tags: ceva , dsp