Ever elusive LTE design wins continue to plague CES

We can certainly blame the virtually non-existent LTE market for that. Except in the U.S., the roll out of LTE has been slow. If you want volume for your modem chips, you need to play not in LTE but the 3G market dominated by Qualcomm, MediaTek, Spreadtrum, Broadcom, Intel and others.

Additional blame goes to Samsung and Apple. The two companies have pretty much sewn up the high-end smartphone market. Samsung designs its own LTE base band chips while Apple uses Qualcomm's chips. Not much room is left for anyone else.

But the real story lies in the very nature of a base band chip, which we in the media apparently don't appreciate very much.

Developing a functional base band chip is a never-ending job, according to CEVA CEO Gideon Wertheizer. When it comes to apps processors, chip suppliers know their job is done. It happens when they see tape out. In contrast, base band chips, after tape-out, need to be tweaked, tested, modified, certified and or again before they can move to mass production.

Wertheizer said, "I've heard that you'd need to dispatch something like 400 engineers to Samsung in order to have your chip tested in their handsets, certified by different operators and tweaked to work well on different bands, and finally getting designed in."

Come on. Four hundred? Really?

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