Customer Spotlight

By Mark Pittman, Vice President of Asia Pacific Sales, MIPS Technologies

Market uncertainty across the globe is forcing companies in all industries to reexamine priorities and expenditures. One place that semiconductor companies can clearly save is by licensing third party IP for the undifferentiated areas of their chips such as processors and analog functionality. By outsourcing these areas, chip makers can save considerable resources and focus on creating unique differentiation elsewhere in the chip.

One region where we are seeing notable momentum in IP licensing—for both processors and analog—is Taiwan. With an aggressive focus on time-to-market, our customers in Taiwan are interested in taking advantage of not only our broad range of off-the-shelf products, but also our robust ecosystem around those products.

Socle Technology Corporation, a Taiwan-based firm specializing in SoC design services and embedded platforms, recently licensed our USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) PHY and Controller in multiple processes. The cores are integrated in Socle’s platforms for customer designs in a range of markets. According to Eric Li, Executive Vice President of Socle, “MIPS Technologies’ proven USB cores in a range of processes provide fast time-to-integration, which is essential in meeting our customers’ unique design goals. They also make Socle’s 65nm platform solutions more complete.”

We also announced that design services company Gateway Silicon Inc. (GSI) licensed a wide range of our USB 2.0 OTG PHY IP cores. GSI President Mr. J.P. Peng noted, “MIPS Technologies’ USB 2.0 OTG PHY IP cores are proven in multiple processes. With leading technologies such as these, we continue to help our customers create differentiated products for markets including portable consumer electronics.”

On the processor side, we announced that ASMedia licensed several synthesizable cores to develop multimedia SoCs for digital consumer devices. An existing MIPS licensee, ASMedia has licenses on several cores for next-generation ICs targeting applications including digital photo frames, media players, and solid state drives (SSDs). According to ASMedia President Chewei Lin, “ MIPS Technologies’ cores offer advantages such as low power, excellent audio/video quality, high performance and reliability, and other features that are highly important for products like SSDs.”

We also recently announced that our synthesizable MIPS32® 24KEc™ processor core is powering Ralink Corporation’s new 802.11n Single Chip Access Point/router SoCs. The 24KEc core enables the RT3052 and RT3050 to process advanced applications such as broadband routing, Ethernet to Wi-Fi bridges, VoIP, online gaming and home entertainment. Fred Jann, Ralink’s Vice President of IC Design, noted, “MIPS Technologies’ synthesizable 24KEc cores, with an optimal combination of high performance, low power and compact area, are a key reason that we are able to deliver this advanced solution.”

These are just a few examples of recent activity in Taiwan, where we are also seeing increasing interest in our high-end processor cores. There is a sweet spot of high-performance applications in Taiwan that will be well suited for our MIPS32® 1004K™ Coherent Processing System—the industry’s first multi-threaded multiprocessor system. Through industry standard benchmarks and customer feedback, we are seeing significant performance gains as a result of its combination of multi-threading and multi-core technology.

As many of today’s electronic devices have an increasing need for not only processor IP, but also analog IP like our USB and HDMI IP cores, MIPS Technologies is bringing more value to customers by solving a larger part of their design challenge.

Asia Pacific continues to be MIPS Technologies’ fastest growing region in the world. In our most recent quarter, we continued to see strong licensing in Taiwan with a significant percentage of our processor licenses coming from the region. Today, we have more than 25 customers in Taiwan alone, with strength in our traditional segments like communications, DTV and set-top boxes, and growing opportunities in other markets such as portable products. With that in mind, expect to see more Taiwan-based announcements from MIPS.

About the Author: Mark Pittman is Vice President of Asia Pacific Sales for MIPS Technologies. Previously Vice President of Processor Business Group Sales for MIPS, Mark Pittman is now responsible for all sales operations in Asia Pacific, including China, Taiwan, Korea and Southeast Asia. Mr. Pittman is also a Director for the US-Taiwan Business Council.