NSING Technologies Passes 250 Million Bluetooth Chips Shipped on Ceva-Waves BLE IP

Ceva (NASDAQ: CEVA) announced on 5 November in Shanghai that NSING Technologies has shipped more than 250 million Bluetooth chips built on Ceva-Waves Bluetooth Low Energy IP. The milestone spans several generations of NSING's Bluetooth portfolio; the two workhorses behind it are the N32WB452 series of dual-core Bluetooth LE MCUs and the N32WB03x series of ultra-low-power Bluetooth LE SoCs.

The division of labour is the now-familiar IP-licensing model: Ceva supplies connectivity technology that has already been through multiple silicon generations, while NSING contributes its own low-power RF design, MCU architecture and peripheral integration. What the 250 million figure adds is proof that the arrangement has cleared volume production and consistency validation across several product cycles — not just a handful of IP deliveries.

Where the 250 million chips went

Ceva names six application areas: electronic toll collection (ETC), wireless remote controls, smart lighting, e-bike security systems, indoor positioning and industrial wireless connectivity. They split into two different demand patterns:

• Replacement and maintenance of installed equipment — ETC on-board units, remote controls, smart lighting modules. Annual unit growth is limited, but the installed base is large and replacement cycles are steady, so unit price and supply horizon matter more than new features.
• Net-new connectivity — e-bike security, indoor positioning, industrial wireless sensing. These devices were not necessarily connected before; adding a BLE SoC buys a data link, and power, footprint and development time dominate the decision.

Xinhui Mu, Vice President at NSING Technologies, framed the number as evidence of portfolio strength and customer trust, and pointed to expansion into new markets and applications. Ziv Hammer, Executive Vice President of Ceva's Connectivity & Sensing Division, put the licensing argument plainly: the scale shows the model translating into sustained high-volume production and long-term royalties.

N32WB452: two cores, and the stack off the application's back

The N32WB452 is the more technically substantial of the two families. Per NSING's datasheet it pairs a 32-bit Cortex-M4F application core running up to 144MHz (180DMIPS) with a Cortex-M0 dedicated to the BLE 5.0 radio and the Bluetooth core stack, the two communicating over an internal bus. Key specifications:

• Radio: BLE 5.0 at 2.4GHz, receiver sensitivity -94dBm, programmable transmit power up to +3dBm, integrated balun and matching network — which removes external matching components and shows up directly in the BOM.
• Current: 3.5mA receive, 3.6mA transmit at 0dBm, both in DCDC mode at 3.0V.
• Memory: 512KB encrypted Flash with partition management, hardware ECC, 100,000 erase cycles and 10-year retention, plus 128KB ROM and 144KB SRAM including 16KB retention RAM with hardware parity checking.
• Peripherals: two CAN 2.0B channels, USB 2.0 full-speed device, SDIO, a DVP camera interface, seven U(S)ARTs, four I²C, three SPI, dual 12-bit 5Msps ADCs, dual 12-bit 1Msps DACs, up to 65 GPIOs, and hardware acceleration for international and Chinese national cryptographic algorithms.
• Operating range: 1.8–3.6V, -40°C to +85°C.

The dual-core split is a concrete engineering benefit, not a marketing line: with the stack on its own core, a real-time control loop is not interrupted by Bluetooth events and the main loop does not need slack for stack timing. The CAN and DVP complement points at products that previously needed a host MCU plus a Bluetooth module — two-wheeler controllers, BMS boards, logistics trackers, gimbals, smart locks — now potentially collapsed into one part.

N32WB03x: standby current in the microamp range

The N32WB03x takes the opposite approach: a single Cortex-M0 at up to 64MHz, 256KB or 512KB Flash, BLE 5.1 with 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 125kbps (S8) and 500kbps (S2) modes, -94dBm sensitivity at 1Mbps, transmit power up to +6dBm, AOA/AOD direction finding, SIG Mesh and multi-role, multi-connection support.

The power table is the point:

• 3.8mA receive and 4.2mA transmit at 0dBm, 3.3V;
• 1.4μA in sleep with full RAM retention, 130nA in power-down;
• 2.9μA for the whole chip while auto-scanning 104 keys, 12μA average at a one-second advertising interval.

Those numbers describe products that must run for a year or two on a coin cell: remotes, electronic shelf labels, asset tags, door sensors, temperature and humidity nodes. At 1.4μA, a 200mAh cell would last more than a decade just idling, which means real service life is set by transmit duty cycle rather than leakage — the precondition for shrinking both the battery and the enclosure.

The market backdrop: BLE as a default layer

Bluetooth SIG and ABI Research forecast roughly 5.9 billion Bluetooth device shipments in 2026, rising to 8.1 billion by 2030, with 99% of devices shipped in 2030 including Bluetooth LE and BLE devices growing at about 20% CAGR from 2025 to 2030.

The specification side is moving too. On 5 November the Bluetooth SIG announced adoption of High Data Throughput as an optional feature of Bluetooth Core 7.0, with a new PHY reaching 7.5Mbps — roughly four times LE 2M PHY — while Channel Sounding pushes ranging accuracy toward the centimetre level. Once such features become tender requirements, how fast an IP generation follows the standard becomes the first selection gate again, which is both the opportunity and the risk of the licensing model.

For chip vendors the contest therefore shifts from "can it connect" to three things: whether one part can absorb both host and connectivity, whether sleep current can drop another notch, and whether the supply horizon covers the customer's full product life. In that context, 250 million units is evidence that the line has cleared volume consistency and long-term supply.

HSY Perspective

The real significance of 250 million units is not that another Chinese vendor reached scale; it is that Bluetooth LE has become a default layer — and once a technology is default, selection reduces to price, lead time and supply horizon. Two public curves support this. Bluetooth SIG and ABI Research project annual Bluetooth device shipments rising from about 5.9 billion in 2026 to 8.1 billion in 2030, with 99% of those devices carrying BLE. Domestically, the installed base is what anchors demand: roughly 380 million e-bikes on the road according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in July 2025, and more than 200 million ETC users per the Ministry of Transport. An installed base of that size means BLE MCU demand is driven by replacement, repair and retrofit rather than whole-device growth from zero, so buyers move from asking whether a stack passes certification to asking what a few cents of BOM difference and a twelve-month allocation commitment cost.

The specifications behind the milestone are not built on low price alone. Splitting the application onto an M4F and the stack onto an M0, with -94dBm sensitivity, 3.5mA receive current and on-chip national cryptographic acceleration, puts the family in the same band as first-tier BLE SoCs; the N32WB03x's 1.4μA sleep and 130nA power-down address the coin-cell decade class. What still separates vendors is toolchain maturity and peripheral integration, not the radio.

The judgment has clear failure conditions. On the ETC side, the Ministry of Transport's "phone plus" tolling scheme approved in February 2026 is diverting new demand, so Bluetooth's role there narrows to maintaining installed units and upgrading on-board devices. On two-wheelers, replacement is paced by the new national standard's trade-in programme, which pulses rather than compounds. And if Channel Sounding and High Data Throughput become tender requirements within a year or two, competition returns to IP generations and RF validation cycles — at which point an installed base of 250 million guarantees cash flow, not a seat.

Sources: Ceva press release (5 November 2026, PR Newswire); NSING Technologies N32WB452 and N32WB03x datasheets and product pages; Bluetooth SIG / ABI Research 2026 market forecast; Bluetooth SIG HDT adoption announcement (5 November 2026); Ministry of Industry and Information Technology e-bike briefing (July 2025); Ministry of Transport ETC user data.