The number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices worldwide is estimated to rapidly grow from 900 million in 2009 to 26 billion in 2020, an increase by more than 30 times, driven by the prevalence of network infrastructure and continuing advances in sensor technology. Seeing the vast unprecedented opportunities, businesses around the globe are gearing up to grab a share of the market and trying to secure a leading position in the IoT industry.
IoT, which has been receiving a great deal of attention from the global information technology industry, involves three major elements: a connecting element, a sensing element, and a processing unit. CEVA, holding the largest share of the DSP market, started its deployment in the IoT market at an early stage. With its keen sense of market needs, CEVA has established complete product lines for all three major IoT elements, which will help Taiwan-based corporations quickly penetrate into market segments such as smart home and wearable devices.
Eran Briman, VP Marketing, CEVA, remarked, "IoT seeks to create higher values by enabling automatic transmission of data to back-end servers. As such, connecting elements are definitely the cores of IoT development. For example, the smart home cannot do without connection to various devices such as smartphones, wristbands, and monitoring devices, so wireless transmission elements including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and PLC are essential. CEVA is one of the few suppliers in the world that are capable of delivering total solutions."
As opposed to other competitors who supply single-purpose solutions, CEVA offers a low power consumption core, CEVA-TeakLite-4 DSP, with a combination of highly reliable connection module devices for customers to choose among Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and PLC modules based on the market positions of their products so that the customer's design process can be simplified to accelerate time-to-market.
Acquiring RivieraWaves to enhance total solutions
Despite its leadership in the DSP market for years, CEVA still strives to keep up with the changing market, to grasp the industry trend, and to devote resources to early development of advanced technologies. Eyeing the vast opportunities arising from IoT and the indispensable wireless transmission elements in IoT development, CEVA, having evaluated a number of factors, decided in July 2014 to acquire RivieraWaves, who had been a partner of CEVA for two years. In addition to helping CEVA further secure its industry leadership, the acquisition will also give CEVA's partners access to connection elements with high efficiency and low power consumption, enhancing their competitiveness in the US$300 billion IoT market.
Founded in 2010, RivieraWaves is a startup IP provider focused on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies. In spite of its short history and a staff of only about 30 members, RivieraWaves' strong R&D capabilities have turned the company into a major communication IP supplier in the world in just a few years. RivieraWaves has signed over 30 licensing agreements with many customers using its IP. Many consumer electronic products run on RivieraWaves-licensed technologies, including the Xiaomi wristband that is hugely popular in China. It is evident that RivieraWaves is armed with outstanding wireless communication technologies.
Briman explained, "CEVA does not limit product development to high performance, low power consumption DSP but rather we aim at being an all-round IP supplier. As for wireless communication solutions, we had cooperated with RivieraWaves for over two years when we began considering the possibility of bringing the cooperation to a closer level. After confirming there should be no problem in terms of corporate cultures for the two companies to merge, we decided to officially complete the merger in July 2014, which is believed to bring 20-25% revenue growth for CEVA."
RivieraWaves' wireless communication solutions, already being widely used in smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices, will help CEVA expand shares in the markets of mobile devices and wearable devices, when combined with CEVA's DSP technology. Furthermore, as CEVA's DSP technology has been constantly receiving positive reviews in the fields of communication, speech, and visual applications, the merger will facilitate quick penetration into emerging markets, such as those for IoT, smart city, and smart home.
No other IP supplier in the industry is capable of offering integrated software-hardware wireless transmission solutions without which a great deal of time and resources has to be spent on system integration, resulting in significant increases in R&D costs. Now with CEVA's solutions, partners only need to focus on developing applications software without having to worry about system integration.
Robust CEVA-MM3101 targeting smart cars
CEVA has been cultivating the market of image and computer vision solutions for many years. CEVA products are known to be easy to use and energy efficient and thus are very popular in the consumer market. Many safety systems, such as pedestrian detection systems, on vehicles of major automobile brands rely on CEVA solutions. CEVA-MM3101 launched in 2013 is especially designed for use in image enhancement and computer vision applications. It features hardware acceleration to ease processor load and thereby save precious power and computation resources.
Compared to competitors' solutions, CEVA-MM3101 is more energy efficient and features over 750 most frequently used computer visual functions in the CEVA-CV database such as CV cores and algorithms used in mobile computing, PC, smart TV, NUI devices, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). These technologies are widely adopted in gesture recognition, facial recognition, and gaze detection.
Briman pointed out, "Take the smart car designed for safe driving for example. Many cars will automatically measure the distance to the car in front or detect approaching pedestrians, and accordingly take control of the brake system to prevent accidents. CEVA-MM3101 is capable of quickly detecting images and thus is widely used in automobiles by partners. CEVA-MM3101 can instantly transmit the image back to the driver and can also work with a computer to let it judge whether to decelerate or initiate the brake."
As IoT encompasses a wide variety of products, Briman suggested that Taiwan-based manufacturers start from smart watches, smart wristbands, and smart homes, where they may have a good chance of gaining market shares. Consumers are anticipating smart home applications as they will be able to connect with monitoring and security control devices to provide safer homes. This is a field that is promising great opportunities and therefore should not be overlooked. As to smart watches and smart wristbands, the consumer market has yet to embrace them with as much enthusiasm as expected because their development has still been limited by battery life. The industry will be able to more clearly see the trend going forward by observing the impact and changes to the wearable device market after the launch of Apple's iWatch next year.
Eran Briman, VP Marketing, CEVA
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