LONDON — Sunplus Technology (Hsinchu, Taiwan) , a specialist designer of consumer electronics ICs, has licensed the TeakLite-III DSP core from Ceva Inc. for its next generation set-top-boxes, HDTV and Blu-ray Disc chipsets.

The deal expands the relationship between the two companies, as Sunplus mMedia uses Ceva's MM2000 portable multimedia solution in its latest Portable Media Player (PMP) chipset.

Ceva (San Jose, Calif.) and Herzelia, Israel, announced the 32-bit Teaklite-III in May 2007.

The companies say the Teaklite-III DSP offers a powerful embedded alternative to having a separate audio chip and offers the advantage of programmability over other IP alternatives to support multiple codecs in software.

They add that as more home entertainment devices with HD audio and video are connected to the internet, the content that they decode can come from many sources, be it Blu-Ray DVD or downloaded from Netflix, or a random internet site.

Since not every source encodes with the same audio codecs, the ability to support existing and future HD and other audio codecs is a big advantage for connected devices.

Eran Briman, vice president Corporate Marketing of CEVA, said the extension of the agreement with Sunplus also marks the IP licensor's continued expansion into the home entertainment market and "being designed into a Blu-ray SoC from an industry leader like Sunplus is a validation of the performance, die size and ease of development benefits offered by the TeakLite-III DSP architecture for high definition audio applications."

Earlier this year, independent benchmarking firm BDTI rated the TeakLite-III as the most area efficient and energy efficient of all processors in its class, achieving a BDTIsimMark2000 score of 2140, using 16-bit data.

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