It’s funny how casually we use the word “connectivity” these days, as though it’s always been part of the conversation. However, speaking as someone who was a small (but perfectly formed) lad in the 1960s, I can assure you that it most certainly wasn’t.
Back then, things didn’t “connect” in the way we think of today—they were simply connected. Our household telephone, for example, was firmly tethered to the wall by a cable that looked like it meant business. If you wanted to use it, you went to it. There was no notion of wandering around the house chatting away, let alone strolling down the street while discussing the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
What we now call “connectivity” spans both the wired and wireless worlds. On the wired side, stalwarts like Ethernet quietly do their thing in the background. On the wireless front, we enjoy a veritable cornucopia of options, including cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. But the idea of connectivity in the sense that “everything talks to everything else” is a relatively recent development.
If you have nothing better to do, join me on a brief trip back through time (cue visual and audio “traveling back through time” effects). The early internet skulked around in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. It was this landmark event that set the stage to bring connectivity into the collective consciousness.
Cellular networks started to gain traction in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s and early 2000s that they became truly ubiquitous. Wi-Fi appeared in the late 1990s, Bluetooth shortly thereafter, and suddenly devices began to communicate without the need for trailing wires.
Then we have the Internet of Things (IoT). In hindsight (the one exact science), what would eventually evolve into the IoT took its first tentative step in 1982, when students at Carnegie Mellon University established remote access to sensors installed in a Coca-Cola vending machine in the computer science department.
The concept of the “Internet of Things,” and the term itself, first appeared in a 1985 speech by Peter T. Lewis. The phrase was later coined independently in 1999 by British technology pioneer Kevin Ashton. According to Wikipedia, the IoT now refers to “physical objects that are embedded with sensors, processing ability, software, and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks,” which, if nothing else, covers all the bases.
The most important aspect of all this, for our purposes here, is the idea that everyday objects can sense, compute, and—most importantly—communicate. Connectivity isn’t just a feature in this world; it’s the very fabric that holds everything together—the invisible glue binding devices, systems, and services into a coherent whole.
I still remember a time when hotels and cafés proudly proclaimed “Wi-Fi available” on little signs in their windows, as though it were some exotic luxury—which, now I come to think about it, it was. People would gather around like moths to a flame, clutching their laptops and wearing expressions of quiet triumph once connection had been established.
By the late 2000s, connected devices had quietly outnumbered humans. Fast-forward to today, and we find ourselves swimming in a sea of ubiquitous connectivity. Depending on how you count them, there are somewhere between three and ten connected devices for every man, woman, and child on Earth—and the number is increasing so fast it makes your head spin.
We expect to be online everywhere, all the time, and, more often than not, we are. You can even access the internet halfway up Mount Kilimanjaro, for goodness’ sake! At this point, “no signal” feels less like an inconvenience and more like a personal affront.
In many cases, it goes further than this. There are still vast swathes of the world where obtaining a cellular signal is, for all practical purposes, impossible. When you find yourself out of touch, the feeling may range from mild frustration—if you’re a businessperson desperate to send an important email—to outright panic if you’re lost in the great beyond.
This is where non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) enter the fray, leaping onto the center stage with a fanfare of flügelhorns (that’s something you don’t tend to forget in a hurry), extending the reach of 5G beyond towers and into orbit.
The reason I’m waffling on about all this here is that I was just chatting with Elad Baram, who heads the Broadband Business Unit at CEVA.
CEVA is one of those fascinating companies whose technology is everywhere, even if its name isn’t. The guys and gals at CEVA specialize in licensable silicon and software IP—essentially the “brains inside the chips”—powering connectivity, sensing, and AI at what’s often called the smart edge. In fact, CEVA’s technology has already shipped in more than 20 billion devices, with another 2 billion or so being added each year (there’s a very good chance that several devices within arm’s reach of you right now contain a little slice of CEVA magic).
Traditionally, the chaps and chapesses at CEVA have been deeply embedded in the cellular world—smartphones, base stations, and cellular IoT—providing the digital signal processing (DSP) and modem technologies that make modern wireless communication possible. But now, like the rest of the industry, they are looking up.
At the heart of this story is CEVA’s third-generation PentaG platform or, more specifically, its new PentaG-NTN platform. Now, before your eyes start to glaze over at the mention of yet another acronym, let’s break things down into simple terms.
If it were possible to provide a pictorial representation of the PentaG-NTN platform, then this is nothing like what it would look like (Source: CEVA)
We can think of a modem as the part of a system that knows how to “speak the language” of a network. In the 5G world, that language is defined by a vast and intricate set of standards developed by the 3GPP. Building a 5G modem from scratch is not for the faint of heart—it’s an extraordinarily complex undertaking involving years of engineering effort.
What CEVA has done with PentaG-NTN is to create a fully integrated 5G-Advanced modem subsystem—a sort of “communication engine” that can be dropped into a chip design and used (more or less) out of the box. Crucially, this isn’t just a collection of building blocks; it’s a pre-integrated, production-ready solution that combines hardware acceleration, software, and verification tools into a single package.
So far, so good—but here’s where things get really interesting. PentaG-NTN is specifically designed for non-terrestrial networks (NTNs)—in other words, satellites. And not just any old satellites, but rather the new generation of low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations that are racing around the planet every 90 minutes or so.
This is a very different environment from your friendly neighborhood cell tower. Signals must contend with Doppler shifts, long propagation delays, and rapidly changing link conditions. On top of that, many of the companies building these satellite systems are experts in spacecraft and orbital mechanics—not in designing cellular baseband modems.
That’s where CEVA’s approach comes into its own. Rather than forcing satellite companies to become modem experts overnight, PentaG-NTN provides a plug-and-play, standards-compliant 5G modem foundation that dramatically lowers the barrier to entry. It allows satellite operators and silicon vendors to focus on what makes them unique while relying on a proven, interoperable communications core.
And this brings us to the bigger picture. For decades, satellite communications and cellular networks lived in largely separate worlds, each with their own technologies, standards, and ecosystems. What we are now witnessing is a convergence of these two domains, driven by the realization that it makes far more sense to extend the existing 5G ecosystem into space than to reinvent everything from scratch.
But wait, there’s more! It would be remiss of me if I omitted to mention that this isn’t a one-off solution aimed solely at satellites. As we previously noted, PentaG-NTN is built on CEVA’s third-generation PentaG platform, which also spawns a sibling solution called PentaG-Edge.
While PentaG-NTN is designed for satellites and non-terrestrial networks, PentaG-Edge targets more down-to-earth applications—industrial IoT, private 5G deployments, and edge devices of all shapes and sizes.
The important point is that both are derived from the same underlying architecture. In other words, whether your device is talking to a base station bolted to a tower or a satellite hurtling overhead at 17,000 miles per hour, it’s essentially speaking the same 5G language using the same fundamental modem technology.
The slightly scary (and rather exciting) thing is that “we ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” as Bachman–Turner Overdrive prophetically put it. If you’d asked most people 25 years ago where connectivity would be today, I suspect their answers would have fallen somewhat short of reality. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the same is true for us now. As we blur the boundaries between ground and sky, between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, we’re only just beginning to glimpse what’s possible. Personally, I can’t wait to see what the next 25 years bring.
