MIPS Technologies, Inc. , formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. , is the most renowned American fabless semiconductor design company to develop the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC Chip based CPU's. MIPS provides architecture and processor core for home digital, networking, embedded, Internet stuff and mobile applications.
MIPS Technologies, Inc. is currently owned by Tallwood MIPS Inc., a company indirectly owned by Tallwood Venture Capital, which bought it on October 25, 2017 from Imagination Technologies, a UK-based company well known for the family of their PowerVR graphics processors. In turn, Imagination Technologies has purchased MIPS after CEVA, Inc. withdraw from the offer on February 8, 2013.
Video MIPS Technologies
History
MIPS Computer Systems Inc. founded in 1984 by a group of researchers from Stanford University that included John L. Hennessy. These researchers have been working on a project called MIPS (for Microprocessors without Interlocked Pipe Stage ), one of the projects that pioneered the RISC concept. Another major founder is Skip Stritter, formerly a Motorola technologist, and John Moussouris, a former IBM.
The initial CEO was Vaemond Crane, former President and CEO of Computer Consoles Inc., who arrived in February 1985 and left in June 1989. He was replaced by Bob Miller, a former IBM executive and Data General senior. Miller runs the company through an IPO and subsequent sales to Silicon Graphics.
In 1988, MIPS Computer Systems design was noticed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) and the company adopted the MIPS architecture for its computers. A year later, in December 1989, MIPS held its first IPO. That year, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) released a Unix workstation based on MIPS design.
After developing the R2000 and R3000 microprocessors, management change brought a bigger dream into a computer vendor. The company found itself unable to compete in the computer market against a much larger company and struggled to support chip and system development costs (MIPS Magnum). To secure the supply of next-generation MIPS microprocessors (64-bit R4000), SGI acquired the company in 1992 for $ 333 million and named it MIPS Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI.
During the ownership of SGI MIPS, the company introduced the R8000 in 1994 and R10000 in 1996 and followed up the R12000 in 1997. During this time, two future microprocessors codenamed The Beast and Capitan is in development; this was canceled after SGI decided to migrate to the Itanium architecture in 1998. As a result, MIPS was spun out as an intellectual property licensing company, offering licenses for MIPS architectures as well as microprocessor core designs.
On June 30, 1998, MIPS entered into an IPO after raising approximately $ 16.3 million at a bid price of $ 14 per share. In 1999, SGI announced it would revamp its operations; The plan will continue to introduce new MIPS processors until 2002, but its server business will include Intel processor architectures as well. SGI played MIPS entirely on June 20, 2000 by distributing all its interest as share dividend to shareholders.
In early 2008 MIPS laid off 28 employees from its processor business group. On August 13, 2008, MIPS announced a $ 108.5 million loss for their fiscal fourth quarter and that they would lay off 15% of their workforce. At that time MIPS has 512 employees. As of May 2018, according to the company's presence on LinkedIn, there may be fewer than 50 employees.
Some famous people working at MIPS: James Billmaier, Steve Blank, Joseph DiNucci, John L. Hennessy, David Hitz, Earl Killian, Dan Levin, John Mashey, John P. McCaskey, Bob Miller, Stratton Sclavos. and Skip Stritter. Board members include: Bill Davidow.
In 2010, Sandeep Vij was appointed CEO of MIPS Technologies. Vij studied under the guidance of Dr. John Hennessy as a graduate student at Stanford University. Before taking over MIPS, Vij was an executive at Cavium Networks, Xilinx and Altera.
The EE Times reports that MIPS has 150 employees on Nov. 1, 2010. If the EDN article August 14, 2008 was accurate about MIPS that had more than 500 employees at the time, then MIPS reduced their total workforce by 70% between 2008 and 2010.
In addition to R & amp; D major in Sunnyvale, California, MIPS has engineering facilities in Shanghai, China, Beaverton, Oregon, Bristol and Kings Langley, both in the UK. It also has offices in Hsin-chu, Taiwan; Tokyo, Japan; Remscheid, Germany and Haifa, Israel.
During the first quarter of 2013, 498 of 580 MIPS patents were sold to Bridge Crossing made by Allied Security Trust, with all processor-specific patents and other parts of the company sold to Imagination Technologies Group. Imagination has defeated Ceva Inc. to buy MIPS with a bid of $ 100 million, and invested in developing the architecture for the embedded processor market.
Company timeline
Maps MIPS Technologies
Products
MIPS Technologies creates a processor architecture that is licensed to chipmakers. Prior to the acquisition, the company has 125 licensees who ship more than 500 million MIPS-based processors each year.
MIPS architecture and core architectures are used in home entertainment, networking and communication products. The company licenses its 32- and 64-bit architecture and 32-bit cores.
The MIPS32 architecture is a high-performance 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) used in applications such as 32-bit microcontrollers, home entertainment, home network devices and cellular design. Customers MIPS license the architecture to develop their own processor or license from the core-shelf of MIPS based on architecture.
The MIPS64 architecture is a high-performance 64-bit instruction set architecture that is widely used in network infrastructure equipment through MIPS licenses such as Cavium Networks and Broadcom.
SmartCE (Connected Entertainment) is a reference platform that integrates Android, an Adobe Flash platform for TV, Skype, Home Jinni ConnecTV apps and other apps. SmartCE allows OEM customers to make integrated products faster.
core family of MIPS processors
The core of MIPS processors is shared by Imagination into three big families:
- Soldiers: hardware virtualization, multi-threading hardware, and SIMD
- M-classes: M5100 and M5150, M6200 and M6250
- I-class: I6400, I7200
- P-class: P5600, P6600
- Aptiv: microAptiv (compact and real-time processor core), interAptiv (multiprocessor, multi-threaded core with nine pipeline stages), proAptiv (super-scalar, highly out-of-order processor core with high CoreMark/MHz score)
- Classic. Family 4K, M14K, 24K, 34K, 74K, 1004K (multicore and multithread) and 1074K (superscalar and multithread).
License
MIPS Technologies has a strong customer license holder base in home electronics and portable media players; for example, 75 percent of Blu-ray Disc players run MIPS Technologies processors. In digital homes, corporate processors are mostly found in digital TVs and decoders. Sony PlayStation Portable uses two processors based on 4K MIPS32 processor.
In the network segment, the licenses include Cavium Networks and Broadcom. Cavium has used up to 48 MIPS cores for the OCTEON family reference network design. Broadcom provides Linux-based MIPS64, XLR, and XLS multicore, multithreaded processors. License uses MIPS to build smartphones and tablets including Actions Semiconductor and Ingenic Semiconductor. Tablets based on MIPS include Cruz tablet from Velocity Micro. TCL Corporation uses MIPS processors for smartphone development.
Companies can also obtain MIPS architectures license to design their own CPU cores using MIPS architecture. Implementation of different MIPS architectures by licensees including Broadcom's BRCM 5000.
Other licenses include Broadcom, which has been developing MIPS-based CPUs for more than a decade, Microchip Technology, which utilizes the MIPS processor for 32-bit PIC32 microcontrollers, Qualcomm Atheros, MediaTek and Mobileye, whose EyeQ chips are based on cores licensed from MIPS.
Operating System
MIPS is widely supported by Unix-like systems, including Android, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
Google's Android agostostic operating system is built on the Linux kernel. MIPS originally moved Android to its architecture for embedded products outside of the phone, which was originally targeted by Google. In 2010, MIPS and its licensors Sigma Designs announced the world's first Android set-top box. By porting to Android, the MIPS processor drives smartphones and tablets running on the Android operating system.
OpenWrt is an embedded operating system based on the Linux kernel. Although currently running on various processor architectures, it was originally developed for Linksys WRT54G, which uses the 32-bit MIPS processor from Broadcom. OpenWrt Table of Hardware now includes MIPS based devices from Atheros, Broadcom, Cavium, Lantiq, MediaTek, etc.
Real-time operating systems running on MIPS include CMX Systems, eCosCentric's eCos, ENEA OSE, Express Logic's ThreadX, FreeRTOS, Green Hills Software Integration, LynxOS LynxWorks, Mentor Graphics, Micro Controller Micro Control System (Ã,ÂμC/OS) , QNX Systems Software 'QNX, Quadros Systems Inc. RTXC (TM) Quadros RTOS, EmbOS Segger and VxWorks River Winds.
References
External links
- PRPL Foundation
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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