Ceva Expands Embedded AI NPU Ecosystem with New Partnerships That Accelerate Time-to-Market for Smart Edge Devices

LAS VEGAS, NV. – CES 2025 - January 7, 2025 – Ceva, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA), the leading licensor of silicon and software IP that enables Smart Edge devices to connect, sense and infer data more reliably and efficiently, today announced new partnerships that enable the more efficient development of AI-enabled personalization, convenience and security features in devices. The partnerships expand the embedded AI ecosystem for the Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU and include new collaborations with Cyberon Corporation and AIZIP that are designed to streamline development time by offering pre-optimized neural networks for keyword spotting, face recognition and speaker identification for deployment on smart edge devices. The previously announced collaboration with Edge Impulse now includes full integration of Edge Impulse Studio and support for NVIDIA TAO toolkit with Ceva-NeuPro Studio for both the NPN32 and NPN64 NPUs. This combination accentuates Ceva’s commitment to simplify and accelerate the development and deployment of AI applications for Ceva-NeuPro-Nano using the NeuPro Studio AI SDK and leveraging the expertise of ecosystem partners.

Chad Lucien, vice president and general manager of the sensor and audio business unit at Ceva, remarked:
“We welcome Cyberon and AIZIP to our embedded AI ecosystem, advancing the value proposition of our Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU by providing customers with ready-to-use neural network models for high-demand, real-world use cases that enhance the user experience. Our continued collaboration with Edge Impulse will further accelerate development of embedded AI applications for Ceva-NeuPro-Nano leveraging Edge Impulse Studio’s low/no-code environment to deploy end-to-end AI applications. Furthermore, our enablement of the NVIDIA TAO toolkit on Ceva-NeuPro-Nano marks a major milestone, allowing AI developers to access, retrain and deploy TAO models through the Edge Impulse Platform on Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU’s. These partnerships underscore our commitment to simplifying AI adoption at the edge, offering power-efficient, high-performance solutions that expand and accelerate our customers’ ability to quickly and easily deliver smart edge applications.”

AIZIP: Driving Sensor Fusion Innovations in TinyML

AIZIP specializes in production quality AI models ranging from vision, audio, and time-series to language models. These models can be combined to create compact AI modules for sensor fusion applications. The collaboration with Ceva centers on AIZIP’s Face Detection model on the Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU, paving the way for future integration of their voice and sensor fusion technologies. This partnership highlights the scalability and versatility of the Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPUs in addressing a broad spectrum of embedded AI use cases.

Yuan Lu, Cofounder and President of AIZIP, commented: “Our goal is to simplify edge AI implementation for next-generation smart edge devices by combining our sensor fusion applications with Ceva’s latest efficient NPU architecture. Our work will reduce AI workloads for cost-effective embedded systems.”

Cyberon: Enabling High-Accuracy Speech Recognition for Embedded AI

Cyberon Corporation, headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, is a leader in embedded speech solutions with decades of experience in Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech technologies, and is a subsidiary of Intelligo Technology Inc. - an AI acoustics specialist committed to consistently delivering top-tier audio solutions. Cyberon’s collaboration with Ceva focuses on its DSpotter keyword spotting technology, optimized for Ceva-NeuPro-Nano. This offline neural network model delivers superior accuracy even in noisy environments, while still maintaining ultra-low power consumption. Supporting always-on, hands-free, and eyes-free interactions, DSpotter is designed to enhance user experience and reliability on mobile and portable devices.

Alex Liou, VP of Cyberon, stated: “Our DSpotter solution brings best-in-class keyword spotting to edge AI devices, enabling seamless, always-on user experiences. Partnering with Ceva allows us to deliver this technology on their Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU, delivering superior performance and power efficiency for hands-free speech-based applications.”

Edge Impulse:

Extending the previously announced collaboration, Ceva and Edge Impulse are now deploying NVIDIA’s pre-trained TAO models on Ceva-NeuPro-Nano using the NVIDIA TAO Toolkit and Edge Impulse Studio which enables developers to retrain with different data sets leveraging the TAO framework. The integration with Edge Impulse Platform ensures developers get accurate cycle count emulation for the full end-to-end AI application on Ceva-NeuPro-Nano, before silicon is available. Edge Impulse’s platform optimizes AI performance for the Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPUs with little to no code. Cutting-edge AI/ML models, including popular digital signal processing (DSP) blocks and a direct integration with NVIDIA’s Tao toolkit, come standard on Edge Impulse’s platform for faster development cycles and deployment on Ceva-NeuPro-Nano.

Zach Shelby, CEO of Edge Impulse, stated: “We are making great strides in translating AI/ML models for effective deployment on edge devices, ensuring that powerful NPUs like the Ceva-NeuPro-Nano can leverage the full scope of their capabilities," said Zach Shelby, co-founder and CEO at Edge Impulse. "Bringing NVIDIA TAO's computer vision models to the Ceva portfolio will unlock numerous novel use cases for AIoT products that require visual data generation and analysis across industries."

Availability

Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPUs are available for licensing today. Cyberon and AIZIP’s neural networks optimized for Ceva-NeuPro-Nano are also available today for licensing. Edge Impulse Platform will be available for use with Ceva-NeuPro-Nano in the coming months. For more information, visit: https://www.ceva-ip.com/product/ceva-neupro-nano/

About Ceva, Inc.

At Ceva, we are passionate about bringing new levels of innovation to the smart edge. Our wireless communications, sensing and Edge AI technologies are at the heart of some of today’s most advanced smart edge products. From wireless connectivity IPs (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UWB and 5G platform IP), to scalable Edge AI NPU IPs and sensor fusion solutions, we have the broadest portfolio of IP to connect, sense and infer data more reliably and efficiently. We deliver differentiated solutions that combine outstanding performance at ultra-low power within a very small silicon footprint. Our goal is simple – to deliver the silicon and software IP to enable a smarter, safer, and more interconnected world. This philosophy is in practice today, with Ceva powering more than 18 billion of the world’s most innovative smart edge products from AI-infused smartwatches, IoT devices and wearables to autonomous vehicles and 5G mobile networks.