MIPS Technologies

Infobox Company
company_name = MIPS Technologies, Inc.

company_type = Public: (NASDAQ: [http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?selected=MIPS&symbol=MIPS MIPS] )
foundation = 1984
location = Mountain View, California, USA
key_people = John Bourgoin, Jack Browne
industry = RISC Microprocessors
products = Processor IP; Analog IP
num_employees = 420 (September 2007)
homepage = [http://www.mips.com www.mips.com]

MIPS Technologies, Inc. (nasdaq|MIPS), formerly MIPS Computer Systems, 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.

After SGI decided to migrate to the Itanium architecture in 1998, it was decided to spin out MTI as an intellectual property licensing company offering licences to the MIPS architecture as well as microprocessor core designs. MTI made an IPO on June 30 1998, i.e. it was no longer wholly owned by SGI since the IPO. SGI spun it off completely on June 20 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 [http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?symbol=MIPS&selected=MIPS MIPS] .

Besides its headquarters in Mountain View, California, MIPS has development facilities in Oeiras, and Porto both in Portugal; Gdansk in Poland; Leuven, in Belgium; Macau, Suzhou and Shanghai in China; Caen in France; Trondheim in Norway, Beaverton, Oregon.

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 [ [http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/hennessy.htm John Hennessy ] ]
*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

References

External links