CEVA to supply more automotive DSP IP in Korea next year

Semiconductor IP company CEVA will focus on offering automotive digital signal processor (DSP) IP to South Korea next year, the company said.

CEVA was founded in 2002 and offers DSP IP and related software for companies. In 2014 it acquired RivieraWaves and in 2019 it bought Hillcrest Labs to expand its area of business to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, motion sensor and deep neural network.

The company posted US$25 million in sales in the third quarter of this year, up 6% from a year ago. Sales from licensing was US$12.4 million in the quarter, a rise of 10% year-on-year. These jumps are thanks to a 105% increase in sales in China year-on-year.

But its sales in South Korea has been slowing. The country accounted for around 25% of its sales in the past three years but this has dropped to 20% this year.

CEVA said sales from telecommunication will be the largest but the company is expecting new sales from vehicle-to-everything next year. Companies like Hyundai Motor Group, Samsung and LG were investing a lot in autonomous driving technology, the company said.

DSP on automotive system-on-a-chip processes sensor data within the vehicle and divide them. It is used for camera machine vision, image processing and audio processing. DSP are being installed on artificial intelligence engines to support advanced driver assistance systems. CEVA’s NeoPro-S and SensPro products have been supplied to Renesas’ automotive SoC. Korean firms Nextchip and Ranix are also its customers.

CEVA also supplies automotive chips with its IP applied to tier-1 automotive component suppliers. CEVA supplies chips such as those made by Renesas using its IP to South Korean tier-1 vendors. 

The company also plans to increase its competence in smartphone, 5G base stations and wireless earphones. In March, CEVA launched its Gen 4 CEVA-XC architecture to support parallel processing workload in 5G wireless RAN. CEVA is also supplying its DSP for Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones.

CEVA said the South Korean government’s support for system semiconductor industry has put new energy in the local industry. More customers are calling in as of the second half of 2020, the firm said, and it expects market condition to improve in 2021.