Inside Ceva's high-performance XC core for 4G handsets, infrastructure

By BDTI
April 14, 2009

In February CEVA announced a new family of high-performance licensable DSP cores, the CEVA-XC family. The cores target 4G cellular applications, including LTE and WiMax, and are intended for use not just in handsets (as with previous CEVA cores) but also in infrastructure hardware.

The CEVA-XC is an offshoot of the CEVA-X architecture (the "C" stands for communications), but the new core family is much more powerful than its predecessors. The highest-performance version supports, for example, up to 64 parallel multiply-accumulate (MAC) computations per cycle, compared to four for the CEVA-X1641.

CEVA has not announced specific clock speeds, but says that it expects CEVA-XC to easily reach 500 MHz in a 65-nm process with a fully synthesizable design. Silicon area has not been disclosed.

(Click to enlarge)
Figure 1: Block diagram for CEVA-XC. (Figure courtesy of CEVA.)

As shown in Figure 1, the core includes a general computation unit for general DSP and control operations, and either one, two, or four "vector communication units". Each vector unit includes a 256-bit SIMD engine that includes16-bit MAC, arithmetic, and logic units.

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