CEVA-TeakLite-III DSP Offers First IP Core Approved for Dolby MS11 Multistream Decoder

Availability of CEVA's Dolby MS11 and Dolby Volume solutions provides significant cost and time-to-market advantages for customers' next-generation home entertainment SoC designs

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Nov. 15, 2011  -- CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA); (LSE: CVA), the leading licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) platform solutions and DSP cores, today announced that the CEVA-TeakLite-III DSP has become the industry's first IP core approved by Dolby for the MS11 Multistream Decoder - the latest Dolby® audio technology for enabling multi-format world-wide broadcast in home entertainment products. The fully-optimized implementation of the sophisticated MS11 decoder represents a significant milestone for CEVA, and extends the company's leadership in developing and implementing high-performance HD audio platforms for next-generation connected, home entertainment SoC designs. In total, CEVA now has more than 90 audio and voice codecs available for the CEVA-TeakLite DSP architecture.

The native 32-bit CEVA-TeakLite-III DSP core provides the foundation for the CEVA-HD-Audio solution. The single-core solution is the most compact and power-efficient HD audio offering available for integration into home entertainment and consumer ICs, with lower overall cost and reduced die size compared to other audio solutions, some requiring dual processors for advanced audio use-cases. For example, a MS11 DDT dual use case, including Dolby Volume over 5.1 channels, consumes less than 30% of available MHz on a single CEVA-TeakLite-III processor at a 40nmG process node. This ensures ample headroom is available on the DSP for additional high-performance tasks such as post-processing or multi-room support.

The Dolby MS11 Multistream Decoder can decode all premium broadcast audio formats for Digital TVs, IPTVs and set-top boxes, including Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Pulse and all AAC bitstreams. In addition, CEVA's fully-optimized implementation of Dolby Volume, the Dolby technology for multi-channel volume equalization has also been approved by Dolby. Approval of these technologies was achieved using actual CEVA-TeakLite-III silicon, providing CEVA customers with a silicon-proven hardware and software solution that streamlines the overall design cycle.  

"The availability of the Dolby MS11 Multistream Decoder on the CEVA-TeakLite-III DSP constitutes a high-performance, cost-effective solution for customers designing digital media platforms for the home," said Jason Power, Senior Director, Broadcast Audio Ecosystem, Dolby Laboratories. "The time-to-market and performance advantages that CEVA's licensees can leverage from a silicon-proven and Dolby approved MS11 solution are critical success factors for these next-generation, Dolby-enabled products."

"CEVA is proud to be the first IP vendor to achieve Dolby MS11 and Dolby Volume approval for a DSP core, providing our customers with a significant time-to-market advantage for their home entertainment SoC designs," said Eran Briman, vice president of marketing at CEVA. "Furthermore, our single-core implementation based on the CEVA-TeakLite-III DSP ensures significant die size and cost savings, critical to next-generation MS11-enabled set-top box and Digital TV products."

CEVA-HD-Audio is built on the CEVA-TeakLite-III DSP core, and includes a configurable fully cached memory subsystem, a comprehensive set of optimized HD audio codecs, and complete software development kit, including software development tools, prototype boards, and test chips.

To learn more about CEVA-HD-Audio, visit www.ceva-dsp.com/hdaudio.

Availability

The CEVA-HD-Audio solution, including the Dolby MS11 Multistream Decoder and Dolby Volume is currently available for licensing. For more information, contact sales@ceva-dsp.com.

About CEVA, Inc.

CEVA is the world's leading licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) DSP cores and platform solutions for the mobile handset, portable and consumer electronics markets. CEVA's IP portfolio includes comprehensive technologies for cellular baseband (2G / 3G / 4G), multimedia (HD video, Image Signal Processing (ISP) and HD audio), voice over packet (VoP), Bluetooth, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA). In 2010, CEVA's IP was shipped in over 600 million devices, powering handsets from 7 out of the top 8 handset OEMs, including Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and ZTE. Today, more than one in every three handsets shipped worldwide is powered by a CEVA DSP core. For more information, visit www.ceva-dsp.com.