Strength of CEVA DSP vs. competitors

[pardot123]

Hi, admittedly a very generic question but wanted to reach out to DSP engineers who have used CEVA IP. Could you please share your experiences on using CEVA. How does it compare with competing products? are they easily interchangeable or would it require a lot of re-coding.

Thanks

[Daniel Nenni]

Let me check on this. Both CEVA and Tensilica have landing pages on SemiWiki for reference:

SemiWiki - Ceva

SemiWiki - Tensilica

There are product, webinar, and white paper wikis.

[pardot123]

Thanks Daniel! I've been through some of the white papers. But I wasn't clear how hard or difficult it would be for someone (say Broadcom) to switch out CEVA and use someone else (say Tensilica) for their baseband IP. Is the software codebase hard to port? Do DSP engineers who work on CEVA get comfortable programming on it that they may resist changing to another IP provider.. Just trying to get a feel..

[Daniel Nenni]

Can you put together a table or matrix for the comparison? The feedback I have gotten has been very positive so I think this would be worth doing. We can make it into a Wiki so the search engines can run with it.

[pardot123]

Here is a first attempt at a table: There may be other relevant questions, so please add. Thanks!!

Comparison of various DSP IP cores

CEVA

Tensilica

ARM

Qualcomm

Other

Power

Speed

Ability to customize (1)

Learning curve / ease of programming (2)

Ability to switch to a competing solution (3)

Other?

(1) How granular is the instruction set?

(2) I would think the harder it is to learn how to the program the core, the harder it would be for an engineer to switch (given the time spent learning the core)

(3) Is it a plug and play core; the easier to do so the better

[pardot123]

Oops, the prior message came out garbled. Not sure how to create a table. Here is an image of a excel snapshot that I have for the table...