LONDON — DSP silicon intellectual property licensor Ceva Inc. has started sampling to select customers a multimode communications processor targeting 4G terminals and infrastructure it claims offers the industry's best performance to date.

Dubbed the CEVA-XC, the programmable DSP architecture supports full transceiver processing for multiple air interfaces in software, including the emerging LTE standard class 5 and WiMAX II (IEEE 802.16m), alongside 3G, 3.5G, Wi-Fi, GPS and mobileTV.

"We have been working on this crucial architecture for 18 months and in collaboration with major vendors of mobile terminals and infrastructure gear such as femtocells," Eran Briman, VP of corporate marketing at Ceva (Herzelia, Israel) told EE Times Europe .

Briman added the CEVA-XC has been designed to address the stringent power consumption, time-to-market and cost constraints associated with developing SoCs for such applications, and the architecture "has been benchmarked by several Tier 1 vendors of handsets, broadband wireless modules and wireless infrastructure gear."

The performance of the processor is said to be equivalent to 8-10 Texas Instruments C64x+ DSPs in terms of DSP efficiency, and to outperform the latest offerings from Analog Devices Inc. and Freescale Semiconductors.

The core also includes a novel power scaling unit to support multiple clock and voltage domains and low power operating modes, allowing developers to meet power limitations while using a fully-programmable approach. "As such we see this development as a hugely important opportunity for us," said Briman.

The CEVA-XC scalable and configurable architecture is said to eliminate the need for heterogenic architectures composed of multiple wireless coprocessors or accelerators which increase cost, time-to-market and software design complexity in wireless SoCs, says Ceva.

The DSP core comes with a complete Integrated Development Environment including an optimizing C compiler, emulators, ESL tools and comprehensive software libraries.