Ceva builds DSP chip and board for IoT prototyping

IP supplier CEVA has made a development platform intended to speed up the prototyping of IoT and similar devices based on its TeakLite-4 DSP core.

Fabbed by SMIC on a 55nm process, the DSP runs at 500MHz, providing greater speed for software testing than a FPGA-based version, which generally tops out at 80MHz, according to Richard Kingston, vice president of market intelligence and investor relations.

Kingston said there is a push to increase signal-processing power on battery-powered devices such as environment controllers and security sensors: “You don’t want to keep going back to the cloud to find out what a voice command is or whether the face of someone in a camera image is homeowner or an intruder. DSP will be used to implement the functionality.”

The platform provides real-time power measurement that allows developers to tune their DSP software for better battery life.

As well as the DSP core, the board’s main chip provides TDM, DMA, I2C, I2S, ICU, timers, and GPIO peripheral ports. Alongside is a Xilinx Zynq that carries an ARM Cortex A9 so that the board can run a Linux operating system and provide additional uncommitted logic for custom hardware.

On-board peripherals include digital (MEMS) microphones, an audio codec with digital and analog audio in/outs, USB, UART, PCIe, and Ethernet ports, user configurable FPGA, GPIOs, DDR memory, SD card, and a small LCD. A header connector provides the ability to attach Arduino Shields.