MIPS Technologies

Coordinates: 37°25′12″N 122°04′22″W / 37.4201°N 122.0728°W / 37.4201; -122.0728

MIPS Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: MIPS), formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of pioneering RISC CPUs. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital consumer, networking, personal entertainment, communications and business applications.

MIPS Computer Systems Inc. was founded in 1984 by a group of researchers from Stanford University that included John L. Hennessy, as a vendor of microprocessor chips. MIPS made its first initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq in November 1989 (after which it was acquired by Silicon Graphics, SGI, spun-off, then IPOed again in 1998).

After being successful in the market with the R2000 and R3000 microprocessors, a management change brought along the larger dreams of being a computer vendor. The company found itself unable to compete in the computer market against much larger companies and was struggling to support the costs of developing both the chips and the systems (MIPS Magnum). To secure the supply of future generations of MIPS microprocessors (the 64-bit R4000), SGI acquired the company in 1992 for $333 million and ran it as MIPS Technologies Inc. (MTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI.

During SGI's ownership of MTI, the company introduced the R8000 in 1994 and the R10000 in 1996 and a follow up, the R12000 in 1998. During this time, two future microprocessors code-named The Beast and Capitan were in development. These were cancelled after SGI decided to migrate to the Itanium architecture in 1998. As a result, MTI was spin out as an intellectual property licensing company offering licences to the MIPS architecture as well as microprocessor core designs. MTI made an IPO on 30 June 1998, i.e. it was no longer wholly owned by SGI since the IPO. SGI spun it off completely on 20 June 2000 by distributing all its interest as stock dividend to the stock holders.

Shares of the company are publicly traded on NASDAQ with the symbols MIPS .

Besides its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, MIPS has development facilities in Shanghai in China and Beaverton, Oregon. It also has offices in Hsin-chu, Taiwan; Tokyo, Japan; Remscheid, Germany and Haifa, Israel.^[1]

Company timeline

• 1981: Dr. John Hennessy at Stanford University leads research in building a microprocessor using RISC principles.
• 1984: MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. co-founded by Dr. John Hennessy, Skip Stritter, and Dr. John Moussouris^[2]
• 1989: First IPO in November as MIPS Computer Systems with Bob Miller as CEO
• 1992: SGI acquires MIPS Computer Systems. Transform it into internal MIPS Group, and then incorporates and renames it to MIPS Technologies, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI)
• 1998: Re-IPO as MIPS Technologies, Inc
• 2002: acquires Algorithmics Ltd, a UK-based MIPS development hardware/software and consultancy company.
• September 6, 2005: acquired First Silicon Solutions (FS2), a Lake Oswego, Oregon company as a wholly owned subsidiary. FS2 specializes in silicon IP, design services and OCI (On-Chip Instrumentation) development tools for programming, testing, debug and trace of embedded systems in SoC, SOPC, FPGA, ASSP and ASIC devices.
• 2007: MIPS Technologies acquires Portugal-based mixed-signal intellectual property company Chipidea
• May 8, 2009: Chipidea is sold to Synopsys.

References

1. ^ Company Press Release. “Synopsys Acquires Analog Business Group of MIPS TechnologiesSynopsys Acquires Analog Business Group of MIPS Technologies.” May 8, 2009. Retrieved May 8, 2009.
2. ^ John Hennessy

External links

• www.mips.com