When Gideon Wertheizer, CEVA's CEO, came to New York this week (June 2nd) to ring the closing bell at Nasdaq to celebrate the company's 10th year anniversary, he talked about CEVA's 21.6 percent revenue growth in 2008, at a time when worldwide semiconductor revenue declined by 5.4 percent. During the same period, the revenue of the semiconductor IP market did increase, but only at 5.5 percent.

If this doesn't cheer up CEVA's investors, or anyone looking for upbeat news, what will?

Here are two headline items laid out by CEVA: 1) CEVA's business has been recession-proof.; 2) CEVA's DSP cores are designed into four of top five handset OEMs today.

But caution.

Whether such accomplishments were achieved by the company's grand design or serendipity is still a matter of debate. Further, how much longer CEVA's current good fortune will last is another good question, especially when 4G starts to roll out in a big way on the competitive handset market.

Nevertheless, nobody argues that CEVA has quietly expanded its market share over the last two years against the competition's DSP cores used in different baseband processors.

Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, observed, "Infineon has an 18% market share (in cell phone baseband shipments for 2008) and the company uses only CEVA cores. Infineon, and thereby CEVA, are clearly #3 in the market after Texas Instruments and Qualcomm."

He added, "Moreover, CEVA is also in all of ST-Ericsson's 3G basebands, so their claim to soon have 25% unit market share is not unreasonable. Of course, CEVA is in a myriad of 2G basebands from a number of other vendors, too."