TOKYO — Intellectual property supplier Ceva Inc. on Thursday (May 31) announced its third-generation DSP architecture dubbed TeakLite III with native 32-bit processing for applications requiring high performance with low power consumption.

Target applications for TeakLite III are home entertainment applications like HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc, set top-boxes and digital TVs requiring advanced audio. Mobile and 3G applications are also being targeted. Ceva said it expects TeakLite III to make headway in the growing Chinese 3G mobile phone market.

Eran Briman, Ceva's senior director of strategic marketing, said the architecture covers communications, voice-over IP and high-end audio applications. TeakLite II was limited to 2G and 2.5G baseband; TeakLite III covers 3G baseband. "HD audio applications, which are new for the TeakLite family, include a complete set of Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and other codecs," he said.

Maintaining backward compatibility with previous TeakLite cores, the newest generation features native 32-bit processing, which includes a 32 by 32 MAC unit, and a 10-stage pipeline that allows the core to reach operating speeds of up to 350 MHz in a 90-nm process and 425 MHz in a 65 nm process.

TeakLite III is also billed as four times faster on basic operations and two times faster on popular audio codecs compared to TeakLite II, Ceva said.

Ceva claimed that its TeakLite family of DSP cores have attracted more than 50 licensees and it has so far shipped more than 1 billion units. Ceva said it has already licensed TeakLite III to three unnamed Tier 1 vendors in the U.S. Asia and in Japan.

The first offerings in the TeakLite III family are the TL3210 and TL3214, which employ external DMA. They are available now. The TL3211 with cache will be available in early 2008, Ceva said.