Did You Know?

MIPS® Support

When licensing a MIPS connectivity interface solution—comprised of a digital controller and an analog PHY—MIPS will integrate the two components and validate the integration, saving our licensees the effort and risk of doing the task themselves.
MIPS licensees can register and login to the MIPS Customer Portal to view all support cases and download the latest software updates and documents.

MIPS Ecosystem

More than 100 companies form the MIPS Ecosystem—including Green Hills Software, MontaVista Software and Wind River Systems—and provide more than 250 products in support of the MIPS architecture.
Popular operating systems compatible with the MIPS architecture include Cisco Systems’ IOS, Express Logic’s ThreadX, Mentor Graphics Corporation’s Nucleus, Microsoft Corporation’s Windows CE.NET, MontaVista Software’s Linux, and Wind River’s VxWorks and Linux.
MIPS Technologies supports the MIPS version of Linux at www.linux-mips.org. The MIPS Linux kernel work is the basis for Linux offerings by our licensees as well as commercial offerings by companies such as MontaVista, Timesys and Wind River.

Analog and Mixed-signal Highlights

MIPS Technologies delivers analog and mixed-signal solutions in a broad range of processes, with over 200 GDSII databases shipped in calendar year 2007 in over 40 processes including commercial foundries and IDM fabs.
MIPS Technologies has more than 80 USB customers worldwide and more than 30 USB 2.0 certified products in mass production. More than 200 million chips have been produced with our USB 2.0 solutions.

Markets and Applications

Automotive telematics provide a new level of visual information from sources such as GPS with mapping and routing, traffic congestion and other useful information for travelers. Sophisticated displays require substantial processing power as well as fast GPS lock time to render the display in real-time. Companies such as NECEL and Toshiba are supplying MIPS-based chips for telematics.
32-bit MCUs are increasingly important alternatives to 8-bit and 16-bit MCUs. MCUs are moving to standard 32-bit processor IP with increasing amounts of analog IP for support of embedded peripherals such as USB, LCD controllers, audio codecs with on board flash and RAM memory blocks. MIPS licensees serving this market include Microchip, Innova Card, Sharp and Toshiba.

Speaking of Microchip, the company’s PIC32 Design Challenge has now entered Phase 2: hardware design. 128 papers were chosen from Phase 1. Now, designers will use the PIC32 Starter Kit to develop design prototypes. Visit www.myPIC32.com to vote on the finalists’ designs, or to offer suggestions and help with the hardware design phase, which continues through October 13^th.

Femtocells are a new exciting new way of improving cellular reception. Percello is a rising force in this market – and it uses MIPS.
Mobileye is the world leader in automotive accident avoidance electronics – and it uses MIPS.

Noteworthy MIPS-Based™ Products

Clearview Technology’s new Infinity miPC uses a MIPS-Based RMI Alchemy AU1250 to power its full range of PC features. The Infinity miPC is the size of a PDA with the power and features of a laptop. MIPS cores are increasingly powering Mobile Internet Devices.

Photo Courtesy of the Clearview Technology website.

Also leveraging an RMI Alchemy AU1250 are the COWON Q5W personal media player and the new COWON P5 premium PMP which features faster and more powerful multimedia processing and multi-tasking. Both have a wealth of features including a 5-inch touch screen, stereo Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB, wide codec support and more.

Photo of the COWON Q5W Courtesy of the COWON America website.

The MIPS-Based Space Cube from Japanese manufacturer Shimafuji is a two-inch cubed computer that runs Red Hat Linux on 1GB of flash. It is being touted as the world’s smallest PC. According to one reviewer, “for such a small and low-powered PC, the Space Cube is actually pretty nippy.”

Photo of the Space Cube courtesy of www.pcpro.co.uk