Driven by growing demand in emerging markets including China, the Middle East, and Africa, smartphones broke the one-billion mark in unit shipments in 2013, while tablet shipments reached 234 million units, surpassing notebook shipments. Although shipments of mobile devices will still have a double-digit increase in 2014, the growth is exhibiting signs of slowing down. As a result, device makers are now eyeing the emerging markets for IoT and wearable devices to save themselves from the price wars looming in the maturing mobile device segments.
Seeing the global consumer market's increasing demand for wearable devices and IoT applications, CEVA, the world's leading supplier of DSP solutions and Connectivity IPs for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, held the 2014 CEVA Technology Symposium on November 21, 2014 in Hsinchu to help Taiwan-based makers quickly respond to market needs and grab a slice of the mobile device market. The symposium highlighted new communication, audio, speech, image, and vision products in addition to LTE-A, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS solutions. Experts and CEVA partners were also there presenting views on market trends and research achievements, with an aim to help attendees venture into the IoT market.
CEVA is the world's largest DSP supplier and has licensed three times more DSP technologies to IC design houses than any competitor in the semiconductor IP industry. More than 250 customers have adopted CEVA's technologies with chipset shipments reaching 5.5 billion units. CEVA DSP accounted for 40% of the mobile devices market in 2013 and audio chips reaching 3.5 billion cumulative units. It is evident that CEVA's DSP products not only have outstanding performance and comprehensive functions but also are widely accepted by the market.
Barbara Yu, Country Manager, CEVA, pointed out, "CEVA doesn't just design high performance and energy efficient DSP chips; we also provide various software, hardware and development tools that our IDM and OEM partners need. That's the reason why CEVA has been winning customers' support for all these years. We help customers quickly respond to market trends and enable them to launch products at the shortest time to market. CEVA's long-term partners include Novatek, Samsung, Intel, ST, and NXP."
Mobile devices experiencing slow growth; wearable devices and IoT trending up
According to a recent DIGITIMES Research report, mobile Internet devices will still maintain high shipment growth in 2015 to reach 1.899 billion units worldwide, of which smartphones will account for about 1.488 billion units, or 78% of the mobile device market. However, it remains to be seen whether the growth rate will hold the crucial 20% level. Tablet shipments will fall short of previous expectations and slip to about 244 million units due to a lack of killer applications.
Wearable devices and IoT applications will be the new force driving the next surge of the mobile device market, indicated Joanne Chien, Senior Analyst & Director, DIGITIMES Research. Wearable devices have great room for development as they are usually designed to work in connection with the increasingly popular smartphones. Given the maturing technology and decreasing costs, a myriad of smart watches and wristbands has been launched since the second quarter of 2014, which is believed to be filling the gap resulting from slumping tablet sales.
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.
Designed specifically for vision and image applications, CEVA-MM3101 is highly sought-after
Novatek Microelectronics Corp., formerly an enterprise products business unit of UMC, has been a major player in the market for over 14 years. Novatek specializes in the design, development, fabrication management, and sales of IC solutions. Upholding values in innovations, quality, and services, Novatek strives to keep up with market trends and has successfully transformed into an IC design company focused mainly on display and image processing technologies. Being a leading provider of display and digital audio/video multimedia solutions, Novatek's products include flat panel display driver ICs, video and TV controller ICs, digital broadcast controller ICs, image controller ICs, and optical storage media chips.
To improve traditional digital cameras' poor performance in low-light shooting, Novatek's new product, NT96665, adopts the image processing CEVA-MM3101 which allows the image controller IC to clearly record 1080P high resolution videos in nighttime and backlight conditions.
Yen Hsi Lee, Technical Marketing Manager, Novatek, said, "We have used CEVA-MM3101 in many of our development platforms. For example, CEVA solutions help the NOVA 3D-NR platform achieve camera calibration for lens distortion, eliminate image noise, and enhance overall recording performance."
CEVA has been cultivating the market of image and visual solutions for many years. 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. There are over 750 most frequently used computer visual functions in the CEVA-CV database used in mobile computing, PC, smart TV, NUI devices, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Therefore, as development of image sensors for cameras encountered a bottleneck, LinX turned to CEVA-MM3101's superior image processing capabilities to develop proprietary multi-aperture imaging technologies, allowing smartphones to take pictures with quality comparable to that produced by single-lens reflex cameras.
Ziv Attar, CEO & Founder, LinX, pointed out, "With 1/3 inch image sensors, the current camera modules on smartphones are only able to deliver 13-megapixel picture quality at best. The technical bottleneck will not likely be broken until 2018 so even the newly launched iPhone 6 and Sony Xperia Z3 cannot offer surprising photography performance."
Attempting to overcome the barrier in camera module development so that smartphones can take SLR camera-like pictures, LinX utilized the technology of stacking two or four lenses and successfully enhanced shooting with assistance from CEVA-MM3101 chip. In addition, post-shooting touch-ups and background changes can be achieved through image tools more easily and efficiently than traditional processes.
CEVA-MM3101 supports facial recognition technologies for unlimited applications
To promote safety on the road, many automobile manufacturers are committed to the development of smart cars. It is hoped that complete information can be provided to the driver in the maneuver of vehicles through additional assistance from sensing elements and imaging chips. CEVA-MM3101 features robust detection capabilities and embeds in the database CV cores and algorithms needed by advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), so CEVA-MM3101 has been widely adopted in car safety systems.
Xiaoshu Zhai, Vertical Marketing Manager, CEVA, stated, "Compared to self-driving cars that are still under development, smart cars better answer current consumer needs as they are able to actively detect approaching pedestrians and automobiles to help the driver watch out for conditions around the vehicle to build a safer driving experience."
eyeSight has extensive experience and unique technologies in the development of human machine interface, indicated Thomas Li, VP Business Development, eyeSight. Outstanding achievements have been made in various gesture and palm detection and tracking functions. The software functions are made possible with the superior computation capabilities of CEVA-MM3101.
Tim Llewellynn, CEO, Nviso, pointed out, "Nviso is making significant achievements in 3D facial imaging. With the help of CEVA-MM3101, facial recognition is faster and more accurate. Applied in the field of smart car, this technology can help lower occurrences of accidents by recognizing signs of fatigue on the driver's face and raising an alert to warn the driver via protection mechanisms."
Irida Labs, focused on visual and image processing software, has also developed a variety of solutions based on the CEVA-MM3101 platform, including video stabilization, shutter calibration, face detection and recognition. CEVA-MM3101 is a high-performing and energy-efficient platform, and with its open API architecture, it is easily integrated with various software and hardware. Even the most complicated imaging and vision algorithms can be completed in a short time, indicated Vassilis Tsagaris, CEO, Irida Labs.
Masayuki Shirahama, FAE Manager-Japan, CEVA, said, "CEVA provides complete development tools with CEVA-MM3101 so that our partners can make good use of the hardware computing resources to simplify and expedite software development."
Designed for mobile devices, CEVA-TeakLite-4 is highly recognized for its speech processing capabilities
CEVA launched the fourth generation speech processing chip CEVA-TeakLite-4 to address the needs of the mobile and consumer electronics market. CEVA-TeakLite-4 is capable of delivering optimized speech clarity in noisy environments by adopting advanced pre-process technologies to lower background noise and improve speech clarity. CEVA-TeakLite-4 additionally features increased data processing speed and transmission bandwidth. CEVA-TeakLite-4 is a high-performing, energy-efficient DSP chip specifically designed for smartphones, IoT devices, and smart homes. It is estimated that CEVA-TeakLite-4 will be included in 850m smartphones by 2018, accounting for 43% of the market, said Eran Belaish, Product Marketing Manager, Audio/Voice, CEVA.
CyWee Motion, devoted to offering applications integrating innovative entertainment and diversified technologies, owns multiple human machine interaction patents internationally. Extensive innovative research achievements include remote motion interaction, wireless high-definition transmission, image/face/object tracking, and cloud processing engines, which are well received worldwide.
CyWee Motion has been collaborating with CEVA for many years and has used CEVA-TeakLite-III in various product lines, which are very popular among customers, said Shun Nan Liou, GM, CyWee Motion.
NXP Software, having been a partner with CEVA since 2012, launched LifeVibes software based on CEVA TeakLite DSP chip to provide Internet phone services. This takes business meetings that could only be conducted in the office onto mobile devices. LifeVibes's speech recognition performance is significantly boosted by CEVA-TeakLite, enhancing online voice conferencing, indicated Sam Kuo, Senior Acoustic Engineer, NXP SW.
Simon Jeong, Director of Asia Sales, Sensory, concurred that CEVA-TeakLite does show outstanding speech processing capabilities, which has greatly facilitated Sensory's business expansion.
CEVA's complete wireless transmission technologies satisfy needs of IoT applications
The reason why the global market is paying attention to IoT is that data can be automatically transmitted to back-end servers to create higher values. Consequently, wireless communication elements become critical cores driving IoT development. 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.
Franz Dugand, Sales and Marketing Manager, Connectivity BU, CEVA, stated that CEVA Bluetooth 4.0 features Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), so it is more suitable for use in mobile devices with low power consumption as the communication range is kept within 50m although the transmission speed may be slightly lower. CEVA Bluetooth 4.0 is an ideal choice to build an IoT environment.
Zhihan Xu, CEO, Maxscend, indicated that CEVA presents the best solution to the market by first integrating a Wi-Fi module with a DSP chip so as to save designers from having to do the integration and adjustment themselves, and the integration also results in compact chip dimensions.
Apart from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, ZigBee and PLC are also indispensable technologies in the development of IoT. CEVA additionally provides related communication modules which can help SGA Innovations seize IoT opportunities, said Ronen Gazit, VP R&D, SGA Innovations.
Eli Ariel, CEO, Galileo Satellite Navigation, stated, "CEVA's DSP has full features and compact package sizes, enabling us to reduce development costs, so we have launched software GPS solutions based on this platform, which supports geographical data of multiple countries and regions, helping us tap the global market."
Taiwan-based manufacturers have been encountering setbacks in markets worldwide as they have been unable to grasp opportunities in cloud computing and mobile devices. They are advised to take advantage of CEVA solutions and thereby seize surging IoT opportunities and regain their leading positions in the global information and communication market.
Barbara Yu, Country Manager, CEVA
Eran Belaish, Product Marketing Manager, AudioVoice, CEVA
Eran Briman, VP Marketing, CEVA
Franz Dugand, Sales and Marketing Manager, Connectivity BU, CEVA (RivieraWaves)
Masayuki Shirahama, FAE Manager-Japan, CEVA
