ceva

CEVA Enters a New Market: Software Companies Designing Their Own AI Chips

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Photo above: CEVA CEO Amir Panush. Photo: Netti Levy.

Israeli semiconductor IP company CEVA has signed a strategic AI licensing agreement with a major U.S. software and AI platform company that is developing its own custom AI processor. Under the agreement, CEVA’s NeuPro-M neural processing technology will be integrated into a custom AI chip designed for intelligent computing devices.

CEVA described the deal as strategically significant because it expands the company’s addressable market beyond traditional semiconductor vendors and OEMs to include software platform companies.

The agreement reflects a broader industry trend in which software and AI platform providers—including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic—are increasingly designing proprietary silicon to optimize AI performance, improve energy efficiency, and better integrate hardware with their software stacks.

“This is one of the world’s leading software and AI platform companies,” said CEVA CEO Amir Panush. “Its decision to build an AI processor based on NeuPro-M reflects the industry’s shift toward AI-centric computing architectures. As AI workloads become increasingly distributed between the cloud and edge devices, platform companies need to optimize the entire technology stack—from silicon and software to operating systems and user experience. This represents one of the most strategically important AI licensing agreements in CEVA’s history.”

CEVA’s NeuPro family of neural processing units (NPUs) is designed to accelerate AI inference across a wide range of applications, from ultra-low-power embedded systems to high-performance computing platforms. According to the company, the architecture can deliver up to 3,500 tokens per second per watt when running large language models such as Llama 2 and Llama 3.2 with more than one billion parameters.

The customer will use the NeuPro-M architecture to accelerate AI inference directly on edge devices. The jointly developed processor is intended to support generative AI, multimodal AI, and agentic AI applications, enabling advanced AI capabilities to run efficiently on custom silicon. As part of the collaboration, CEVA worked closely with the customer to optimize neural networks specifically for the company’s AI workloads.

The deal also highlights a structural shift taking place across the semiconductor industry. Increasingly, companies whose core business has traditionally been software are investing in custom chip development, seeking tighter integration between hardware and software while reducing dependence on off-the-shelf processors. For IP suppliers such as CEVA, this emerging customer base represents a new growth opportunity beyond the company’s traditional markets.

Strategic Partnership Between Microchip and Ceva in AI

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Herzliya-based Ceva (NASDAQ: CEVA), a leading provider of IP for semiconductor manufacturers in wireless connectivity, smart sensing and AI, announced a long-term strategic collaboration with Microchip Technology, one of the world’s leading semiconductor companies and a major player in the embedded systems market. Under the agreement, Microchip will incorporate Ceva’s NeuPro NPU AI processors into a wide range of its products, spanning from embedded devices to next-generation GenAI applications. Following the announcement, Ceva’s stock gained around 2.8%, bringing its market capitalization to approximately $650 million.

Ceva’s NeuPro AI processors are designed to accelerate AI workloads at the edge, providing high performance with low power consumption. As part of the collaboration, Microchip will also integrate Ceva’s NeuPro Studio development environment into its SDKs, enabling developers to train, import, and optimize AI models directly onto Microchip hardware.

Ceva CEO Amir Panush said, “Artificial intelligence is becoming a fundamental component of every device and system—from the phone to the data center.” Mark Reiten, VP of AI at Microchip, added that the partnership with Ceva “brings rich AI capabilities to markets where cost and power consumption have traditionally been key barriers.”

Headquartered in Arizona, Microchip Technology is among the world’s largest suppliers of embedded semiconductors, with a strong presence in microcontrollers, communication components, and power management ICs for automotive and industrial markets. The collaboration with Ceva aims to position Microchip at the forefront of the Edge AI revolution, offering its customers fully integrated hardware–software AI solutions.

Rohde & Schwarz and Ceva Present Industry’s First Test Solution for Bluetooth OTA UTP

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Above: Rohde & Schwarz wideband radio communication tester

Rohde & Schwarz and Ceva unveiled the world’s first test solution supporting the upcoming Bluetooth® OTA UTP Test Mode, enabling over-the-air (OTA) controlled device testing. The two companies will showcase their joint solution at embedded world 2025 in Nuremberg. Rohde & Schwarz and Ceva closely collaborated to develop this test solution, powered by Ceva-Waves Bluetooth® Low Energy IP. It runs on the R&S CMW radio communication tester platform from Rohde & Schwarz, with integrated Ceva-Waves Bluetooth® Low Energy controller software licensed from Ceva.

OTA-Testing for Bluetooth devices

Until now, wearables and other small and highly integrated Bluetooth devices required testing using the Direct Test Mode which involves a control cable between the test instrument and the device under test (DUT). Especially encapsulated DUTs make it difficult or even impossible to integrate a connection for this control cable. Hence, sending test control messages over the air without any cabling between tester and DUT as specified in the UTP mode will simplify the test setup immensely.

The Ceva-Waves Bluetooth Low Energy platform has been shipped in billions of devices across various markets. The Bluetooth UTP Mode on the R&S CMW radio communication tester platform offers a simple and precise signaling test solution, suited for Bluetooth Low Energy radio tests in development, pre-conformance and production testing. All Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth Classic Radio measurements are unified and can be performed with a single test setup over the air in a signaling connection. Comprehensive test automation is crucial to ensure compliance to the Bluetooth specifications.

Tal Shalev, VP and general manager of the wireless IoT business unit at Ceva, commented: “The introduction of Bluetooth OTA UTP Test Mode is a crucial advancement for testing next-generation consumer Bluetooth.” Christoph Pointner, Senior VP for Mobile Radio Testers at Rohde & Schwarz, said: “Thanks to our close partnership with Ceva and their Bluetooth Low Energy IP we were able to implement the new Bluetooth UTP Test Mode in line with the specifications of the Bluetooth Core Specification Working Group on our platform.”

Both partners are actively involved in defining the specifications within the Bluetooth Core Specification Working Group. The solution is compatible with the already ratified Bluetooth releases up to release 6.0 Channel Sounding, supporting the existing Direct Test Mode (DTM) with the conducted control connection.

CEVA Announces CEO Transition Plan

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Above: Amir Panush (left) and Gideon Wertheizer

CEVA announced that CEO Gideon Wertheizer has chosen to retire at the end of 2022. The board of directors has unanimously appointed Amir Panush as CEO effective January 1, 2023. Wertheizer will continue to serve as an active member of board of directors and will be employed in an advisory role, to ensure a smooth leadership transition.

Wertheizer had joined CEVA since the company’s inception 20 years ago and served as its CEO for the last 17 years. Amir Panush was selected following an extensive search. He joins CEVA from InvenSense, a TDK group company, where he served as CEO and General Manager of TDK Corporation’s MEMS Sensors Business Group and where he led the company through revenue growth of over 100% since 2020. Previously he had held various leadership positions at TDK, following TDK’s acquisition of InvenSense in 2017.

Prior to InvenSense, Panush held several leadership roles at Qualcomm and led strategic marketing and partnerships at Atheros Communications (acquired by Qualcomm). Panush said: “CEVA is uniquely positioned to leverage its deep portfolio of wireless connectivity and smart sensing IPs at a time when the market opportunity for these technologies has never been greater.”

$15.7 million write-off

CEVA license wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies such as Digital Signal Processors, AI engines, wireless platforms, cryptography cores and complementary software. Its total revenue for the third quarter of 2022 was $33.7 million, a 3% increase compared to $32.8 million for the third quarter of 2021.

GAAP net loss for the third quarter of 2022 was $22.3 million, as compared to a $0.2 million reported for the same period in 2021.  This is primarily attributable to a $15.7 million write-off of deferred tax assets, , (b) a $5.0 impairment charge with respect to  an investment in Immervision and $3.5 million of which was recorded in operating expenses.

CEVA’s 5G IP modem reveals New Industrial Mega-trends

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The provider of IP solutions for semiconductors, CEVA, announced the availability of PentaG2, its second generation IP modems platform for 5G networks. But unlike the first generation, PentaG2 is planned to answer the needs of a mature 5G industry characterized by well defined use cases and much detailed standards.

VP Marketing at CEVA, Moshe Sheier, told Techtime that the first generation of PentaG was heavily relied on Software Defined Radio, since the industrial standards were not yet finalized. “The latest releases of 3GPP 5G NR standards provides stable ground for new systems and allowed us replace many software defined accelerators with hardware ones, thus improving performance and reducing power consumption.”

PentaG2 includes a complete set of programmable accelerators and coprocessors, including Bit Modulation Unit (Tx), Bit Demodulation Unit (Rx), Equalizer and MAC engine co-processor Unit, Decoder/Encode as well as HARQ, MLD, Multi-radix DFT and more. The platform also includes a scalar DSP for PHY control, hardware acceleration scheduling, and running the protocol stack. All accelerators come with standard AXI interfaces for ease of integration.

“5G is not all about Smartphones”

PentaG2 platforms will initially be offered in two configurations: PentaG2-Max that is able to efficiently process the immense workloads required for 3GPP releases 16 and 17, and PentaG2-Lite for reduced capacity use cases, including LTE Cat1 and future 3GPP Rel-17/18 NR RedCap (Reduced Capacity, aka NR-Lite). “5G today is not all about smartphones, there are new established use cases including smart home, Industrial IoT, Wearable and more that connects 5G networks but can use smaller, chipper and lower performance chips.”

 

CEVA to provide IP for all of DARPA Programs

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CEVA announced an open licensing agreement with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to to provide support for DARPA programs. The partnership is a part of the DARPA Toolbox initiative. It establishes an access framework under which DARPA organizations can access all of CEVA’s commercially available IPs, tools and support to expedite their programs.

CEVA, Arm and Verific are the first technology companies to sign commercial partnership agreements under DARPA Toolbox. CEVA is a licensor of IP for Digital Signal Processors, AI processors, wireless platforms and complementary software for sensor fusion, computer vision, voice and other key enabling technologies. Key technologies offered by CEVA under this initiative include DSPs and software for 5G baseband processing, short range connectivity, sensor fusion, computer vision, sound processing and Artificial Intelligence.

DARPA Toolbox is a new, agency-wide effort aimed at providing open licensing opportunities with commercial technology vendors to the researchers behind DARPA programs. For commercial vendors, DARPA Toolbox will provide an opportunity to leverage the agency’s forward-looking research and a chance to develop new revenue streams based on programmatic achievements developed with their technologies.

Renesas and CEVA to Develop a SoC for ADAS

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CEVA from Herzlya, Israel, announced that Renesas has licensed its DSP technology to develop an automotive System-on-Chip (SoC) for a new ADAS system of a  a very large automotive manufacturer in Japan. “This is a monumental agreement”, said Gideon Wertheizer, CEO of CEVA, during the company’s earnings call for Q3, 2020. In fact, this design win put both CEVA and Renesas in a direct competition with Intel’s Mobileye and NVIDIA Drive.

Naoki Yoshida, Vice President at Renesas noted regardin the agreement: “In active safety and self-driving applications, DSP processing is a key IP for processing and segmenting sensor data generated by sensors on vehicles.” This is exactly what CEVA is doing: It provides IPs of Digital Signal Processors, AI processors, wireless platforms and complementary software for sensor fusion, image enhancement, computer vision, voice input and artificial intelligence.

During the conference call, Gideon Wertheizer revealed more interesting details: “The agreement is based on a project. Our customer (Renesas Electronics) won with a very large automotive manufacturer in Japan, for an ADAS solution for new L2+ and L3 cars, which are projected to start production by 2025. It’s a mid-range car, that means volume versus the premium part.”

CEVA is not unfamiliar with the automotive industry: It has Automotive agreements with On Semiconductor, Yamaha, Toshiba, Rohm, AutoTalks and others to provide IP blocks for Wi-Fi, V2X, cameras and more, but becoming a main technology provider for an ADAS system is something else. This is a strategic platform – the playground of giants. And it turns out that the giants may be too big for their clients.

Wertheizer: “NVIDIA and Mobileye push their own closed and vertically integrated solutions. But automotive Tier one and OEMs are seeking an open high-performance technology where they can take advantage of their in-house excellence while not being locked into a certain vendor. Our powerful DSPs, AI technologies and our collaborate business model set a comprehensive foundation that enable OEMs to become supplier agnostic and translate their innovation into a competitive edge.”