Product category:
Intellectual Property Cores
News Release from: MIPS Technologies
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 01 September 2004
Cores for success in portable designs
The Sony PlayStation Portable and Canon's EOS Digital Rebel camera family are among the growing list of portable devices being driven by MIPS-based application processors.
The Sony PlayStation Portable and Canon's EOS Digital Rebel camera family are among the growing list of portable devices being driven by MIPS-based application processors MIPS Technologies has revealed that the industry-standard MIPS microprocessor architecture is extending its reach into the mobile applications space
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 23 Feb 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The architecture's inherent low-power and high-performance capabilities have already made it the de facto standard in consumer products such as digital set-top boxes, digital TVs and DVD recorders.
Growing requirements for audio, video and other digital signal processing (DSP) tasks are increasing the performance demands on applications processors inside many mobile products.
This trend is causing OEMs to reconsider their system and hardware configurations - and therefore the microprocessor architecture upon which the system relies - to maximise performance capabilities while prolonging battery life.
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"We chose the MIPS architecture for our digital camera processor because the technology enables our team to design products that maximise overall system performance while minimising any impact to battery life", said Coby Sella, Vice President and General Manager of Zoran's Mobile Division.
"The power savings is achieved in the design of our Coach processor and in the system architecture we deliver to the digital camera manufacturers".
"The success of the design has been proven by Zoran's growing market share of the overall digital camera market".
"For a growing list of customers, the MIPS architecture is the choice for a range of mobile applications because it uses low power to deliver the right performance at the right price point", said Russ Bell, Vice President of Marketing at MIPS Technologies.
"We achieve this unique offering by leveraging standard off-the-shelf memories, libraries and EDA flows from industry leading vendors.
Moving forward, MIPS Technologies will continue to deliver optimised products that meet the power and performance demands of high-growth embedded markets".
The MIPS architecture offers low power advantages that are key to SoC designers targeting battery-powered devices.
At the heart of the MIPS architecture is a streamlined architecture that has met the demands of generations of applications over a 20-year period.
The MIPS instruction set offers 32-element register files (not 16, as with other architectures), which reduce the need to access embedded cache and main memory to retrieve data.
Fewer clock cycles are needed to perform most tasks allowing the system to run at lower frequencies.
These characteristics translate into lower core and system power consumption while operating at maximum microprocessor performance.
MIPS Technologies' customers may gain design flexibility through access to ISA licences, optimised hard macros and synthesisable cores, which enable the optimisation of silicon die area and power configurations to maximise battery life.
Additionally, MIPS Technologies' line of the industry's highest performing cores offer customers more system headroom, so future upgrades can be implemented in software easily and quickly.
The MIPS architecture is gaining key design wins in a range of battery-operated devices.
OEMs shipping mobile MIPS-based products include Canon, Casio, Fujifilm, Fujitsu, JVC, Minolta, Pentax, Philips, Samsung and Sony.
MIPS Technologies licensees providing innovative and low-power MIPS-based silicon include AMD, Broadcom, LSI Logic, NEC, Philips Semiconductors, Sunplus, Thrane and Thrane, Toshiba and Zoran.
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