Surpassing 100 licensing deals for WiFi technologies

RivieraWaves was acquired by CEVA in July 2014, as part of the company’s diversification strategy and has continued to go from strength-to-strength under CEVA’s stewardship, dominating the semiconductor IP licensing industry for both Bluetooth and WiFi. In the same period, CEVA’s customers have shipped more than one billion Bluetooth and WiFi powered devices, with more than 300 million CEVA-powered Bluetooth devices shipped in 2018 alone.

Ange Aznar, Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless IoT Business Unit at CEVA, commented: “This accomplishment of surpassing 100 Bluetooth and WiFi licensing deals in less than five years is extremely impressive and I am proud to be part of the leadership team through this period of strong growth.

“This achievement is a testament to the performance and quality of the IP delivered by our engineers and the strength of our sales organisation. We look forward to seeing what innovative and exciting products our large wireless IoT customer base bring to market in the coming years.” 

CEVA is the industry’s only licensor of both the Bluetooth Dual Mode and Low Energy standards, and has been broadly licensed both to leading semiconductor vendors and OEMs, worldwide. CEVA has pioneered the hearable and wearable markets, and has powered many iconic devices, including the Xiaomi Mi Band series of activity trackers, Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids from leading players including Oticon, smart thermostats from Nest, the highly popular Tile trackers, Pokémon Go PLUS and hundreds of wireless speakers, earbuds and wearables.

CEVA’s WiFi IP powers products scaling from smart devices to access points, and has shipped in tens of millions of devices to date. With the advent of WiFi 6, WiFi is proving to be more popular with IoT device designers due to the low power capabilities this latest standard brings. CEVA’s customer base for wireless connectivity includes Actions, ASR Micro, Atmosic, Beken, Bestechnic, Celeno, Dialog Semiconductor, Espressif, LifeSignals, NXP, ON Semiconductor, Optek, Oticon, RDA, Rockchip, Siflower, ZTE and many others.

Andrew Zignani, Principal Analyst, ABI Research, commented: “Licensable Intellectual Property plays an important role in meeting the extraordinary growth projections for Bluetooth and WiFi, with many companies choosing to integrate the connectivity standard into their SoC designs to shrink the cost, power and size of their devices.

“CEVA is a key enabler for a whole wave of companies embedding Bluetooth and WiFi, providing them with leading-edge technology and industry-renowned expertize in wireless connectivity.”

CEVA has the broadest portfolio of connectivity and smart sensing technology IPs in the industry today. Its RivieraWaves WiFi IP family offers a comprehensive suite of platforms for embedding WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n (WiFi 4), 802.11ac (WiFi 5) or 802.11ax (WiFi 6) into station and access point SoCs/ASSPs, and is offered pre-integrated with popular operating systems including FreeRTOS and AliOS Things.

The RivieraWaves Bluetooth IP family provides comprehensive solutions for both Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth dual mode connectivity. All Bluetooth 5.1 features are supported, including Direction Finding (AoA/AoD), Randomised Advertising Channel Indexing, Periodic Advertising Sync Transfer, GATT Caching and other enhancements, making it popular for asset tracking, general IoT and Bluetooth audio.

For audio applications, including earbuds and smart speakers, the RivieraWaves Bluetooth IP is complemented by CEVA’s family of advanced DSPs and algorithms for sound/audio/voice/speech. For low power wide area (LPWA) applications, CEVA offers the eNB-IoT compliant CEVA-Dragonfly IP solution, with built-in GNSS capability.