Israeli CEVA has made it into the IPhone 7

20 September, 2016

Ceva’s stock price soared to an alltime record following the confirmation that the company’s DSP based modem will be integrated into half of all new IPhone s7 devices

CEVA’s stock price soared to an alltime record following the confirmation that the company’s DSP based modem will be integrated into half of all new IPhone s7 devices

the ceva-intel-modem
the ceva-intel-modem

Israeli CEVA’s stock price has soared by more than 10%, reaching an all-time NASDAQ record of $34.99. The company is currently traded at a market cap of $748 million. The last time CEVA’s stock  reached similar summits was in July 2011. At the time, CEVA’s stock was traded for $31.9.

The engine behind the surge in CEVA’s stock price was Apple’s much discussed IPhone 7 launch. After months of rumors and speculations, covered extensively by Techtime, freshly dismantled IPhone 7’s confirm that Apples has integrated Intel’s new XMM 7360 modem, which uses a CEVA DSP.

ceva's stock price surged
ceva’s stock price surged

Intel’s LTE modem is based on CEVA’s Baseband processor (most probably on the CEVA-XC320). The modem enables mobile devices a download files at a rate of up to 300Mpbs. It supports 6 different connectivity standards including: EDGE, LTE-TDD, LTE0FDD, HSPA+ and Chinese standard TD-SCDMA.

Apple split the market between Intel and QUALCOMM: CMDA network devices to be sold by Sprint, Verizon and most of the Chinese providers will be equipped with Qualcomm modems, while all the rest, including these sold by AT&T and other leading providers will be equipped with Intel’s CEVA based modem.

Techtime has received a Benchmark report suggesting Intel will supply half of the IPhone7 modems, a much bigger cut than reported by Bloomberg. Though Apple’s sale are not in their prime, and the company has even reported a 15% decline in sales compared to last year, in which it sold over 230 million devices, the figures are still very impressive – about 100 million devices will roll out with Intel’s CEVA based modem.

iphone-7According to Bechmark’s estimates, CEVA has also made it into the AirPod Bluetooth headphones, sold together with the IPhone 7, which has no headphones jack. According to Benchmark analysts, CEVA’s intellectual property Bluetooth modules are integrated into the headphones. As in the case of the modem, Apple chose to split the market between Intel and Qualcomm, but it may be that the market for headphones is even bigger (in unit numbers, not revenue) than the IPhone market. Apples AirPod’s are compatible with the company’s older devices such as previous IPhone versions and tablets.

CEVA’s next conquest: Cameras

Benchmark estimates that CEVA is about to “make it” into another feature of the smartphone market – CEVAS intellectual property DSP is has not been integrated into the IPhone 7’s dual camera image processing, but the standardization of double lensed cameras poses an opportunity for CEVA to push its own intellectual property in the future.  Benchmark is probably referring to CEVA’s new image processor – the CEVA-XM4, designed to bring human-like vision and visual perception to embedded systems.

The XM4 features hightend D vision, Computational Photography, Visual Perception and Analytics mitating human vision and adding computational photography to embedded systems is challenging, given the typically limited space and power resources. To address these issues, CEVA incorporated programmable wide-vector architecture, with fixed- and floating-point processing, multiple simultaneous scalar units, and a vision-oriented low-power instruction set.

Benchmark’s conclusion: CEVA’s LTE sales will increase by 50% in 2017. This favorable forecast could very well be one of the caused for yesterday’s surge in CEVA’s stock price.

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