MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., – CEVA, Inc., a licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) platform solutions and DSP cores, announced that it has made a minority equity investment, together with Mitsui & Co. Global Investment Ltd, in eyeSight Mobile Technologies, a leader in touch-free interfaces for smartphones, tablets, PCs, smart TVs and other digital devices. Under the equity investment agreement, eyeSight will offer its advanced portfolio of touch-free interface technologies, including gesture recognition and finger tracking software, to users of the CEVA-MM3000 image signal processing (ISP) and video platform. The combined offering will deliver an ultra-low power, software-based solution, enabling the cost-efficient deployment of gesture recognition technologies in mass market devices.
Gideon Wertheizer, CEO of CEVA, commented: “The combination of our fully programmable CEVA-MM3000 platform together with eyeSight’s industry-leading gesture technologywill clearly demonstrate the versatility of our powerful, software-based ISP and video platform. This equity investmentin eyeSight is aimed at expanding the addressable markets for our CEVA-MM3000 platform to include the burgeoning embedded vision and scene analysis arenas. We are strategically focused to further enhance our DSP and platform ecosystems, providing our customers with broader solutions to enable true product differentiation and to shorten their time to market.”
The complexity of gesture recognition applications continues to rapidly evolve and poses a significant burden on CPU performance and power consumption. By offloading the main CPU from performing advanced gesture technologies to the CEVA-MM3000, it is estimated that the system power efficiency can be improved by a factor of 20X, crucial for any battery powered device. Enabling low cost deployment for gesture applications, eyeSight leverages the existing camera in any device to enable the gesture functionality without any increase in bill-of-materials. In addition, the fully programmable nature of the CEVA-MM3000 platform facilitates future upgrades of eyeSight’s technologies through software updates, and allows customers to add their own proprietary features and algorithms to the platform.
Gideon Shmuel, CEO of eyeSight, commented: “We are pleased to strengthen our relationship with CEVA towards advancing the adoption of gesture technologies in mass market devices. Semiconductor vendors require higher performance, lower power and more flexible processor solutions to successfully incorporate advanced gesture technology into their product designs. Our strategic partnership with CEVA brings together our industry-leading gesture recognition technologies with the industry’s most advanced ISP and video platform to offer the CEVA-MM3000 users a powerful, software-based solution that delivers dramatically improved performance when compared to existing RISC-based architectures.”
The CEVA-MM3000 is a family of scalable, low-power, fully programmable ISP and video solutions, targeting pre and post processing of HD video and imaging functions, image pipeline, ISP applications, scene analysis and video codecs. The CEVA-MM3000 comprises a complete hardware platform, pre-optimized software layers, and a comprehensive software development environment, including compilers, debuggers, simulators and development boards. The solution is scalable to meet various market needs, from smartphones and tablets to smart TVs and set-top boxes.
CEVA and Mitsui & Co. Global Investment Ltd participated in the current investment round of $4.2 million.
