London Calling: Who is NXP Software?

Ceva Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), a licensor of DSP cores, has got together with NXP Software BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), to port software for speakerphone and multi-microphone noise suppression, acoustic echo cancellation and voice enhancement onto Ceva cores.

The LifeVibes VoiceExperience software from NXP and it has been ported to TeakLite family of DSPs including TeakLite-4, according to Ceva.

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Ceva has a good position in mobile phones and claims that its DSP cores have been used for audio and voice processing in more than 2 billion pieces of equipment to date. And the LifeVibes software is already deployed on the Ceva TeakLite-III in a smartphone, so any body that picks up the combination now will be a bit behind the curve.

But it turns out that NXP Software also has a good position in mobile. The company started working on its LifeVibes software in 2003 as Philips Software and has been successfully shipping the software for music and multimedia players on mobile phones for many years.

By 2010 LifeVibes multimedia software had shipped in 750 million devices and by November 2011 NXP Software had increased that so they could boast they had shipped in one billion mobile devices, that's almost as good as Ceva's boast.

That obviously represents some major design wins for video, audio and multimedia software, probably in some brands of mobile phone that we would all recognize although NXP Software does not reveal many names.