Recognizing the rapidly growing interest in wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT), CEVA has agreed to pay some $19 million to acquire privately held RivieraWaves, a four-year-old company specializing in silicon and software intellectual property (IP) related to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.
CEVA will make an initial payment of about $12 million at closing with the rest payable upon satisfaction of certain performance and other milestones as well as a two-year retention plan for current RivieraWaves' employees.
CEVA, which licenses IP platforms based on digital signal processing (DSP), said the acquisition will extend its licensing and royalty revenue base beyond smartphones, tablets and small cells into emerging markets such as wearables, the smart home, connected cars and IoT. The Mountain View, Calif., company said that based on estimates from ABI Research, its combined addressable market should exceed 35 billion connected devices by 2020.
Based in Sophia-Antipolis, France, RivieraWaves was founded in January 2010 and specializes in wireless connectivity platforms for integration into high volume, system-on-chips (SoCs). The company's latest Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth Smart 4.1 IPs are complete solutions, composed of both the PHY and MAC layers along with system and RF support, and are already deployed with leading semiconductor companies, CEVA said. The IPs are available in both hardware-based and a DSP-based designs.
CEVA and RivieraWaves have been collaborating over the past two years on the Wi-Fi market, with joint customers deploying RivieraWaves' Wi-Fi IP on a CEVA DSP targeting mobile devices and the connected home.
For more:
- see this CEVA release
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