MIPS Wins OCP-IP Contributor of the Year Award

BEAVERTON, OR — November 30, 2010 — Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) today announced MIPS Technologies  (NASDAQ: MIPS) is the recipient of the annual Outstanding Contributor of the Year Award for 2010.  The OCP-IP Governing Steering Committee grants this award each year to a member that makes key contributions to the further advancement of the OCP specification or supporting infrastructure.

The committee acknowledged MIPS Technologies for its leadership, commitment and contribution to OCP-IP’s Specification Working Group.  The Company played a key role in completing development of the cache coherence extensions included in OCP 3.0.  OCP 3.0 coherence extensions enable hardware-based coherence among the wide variety of heterogeneous CPUs, DSPs, accelerators and streaming input/output devices that characterize advanced SoCs.

The OCP extensions differ from traditional coherence approaches by cleanly separating the primitive operations associated with maintaining coherence from the specific system-level approach for implementing the communication and storage aspects of a coherent system. This extends a key advantage of OCP – the ability to develop IP cores independently from the system in which they will be used – into the domain of cache coherent systems. In particular, the OCP coherence extensions have been validated against both invalidate-based snoopy and directory-based coherence schemes. A detailed technical article on cache coherence is available here.

MIPS Technologies leveraged the new Cache Coherence feature in its multithreaded, multiprocessing MIPS32® 1004K™ Coherent Processing System (CPS) and its new superscalar MIPS32 1074K™ CPS—multicore processors that provide two paths to performance, depending on the application.

"We are pleased to be named Contributor of the Year by the OCP-IP," said Art Swift, vice president of marketing and business development, MIPS Technologies. "Working with other leading companies in the OCP-IP community, we are creating standard interfaces that are critical for the next generation of multiprocessor products."

Work on OCP 3.0 was executed by members of the OCP-IP Specification Working Group including: MIPS Technologies, Nokia, Sonics Inc., Texas Instruments, Toshiba and other industry-leading companies.

Companies wishing to participate in the OCP-IP Specification Working Group are invited to contact admin@ocpip.org

“OCP 3.0 and the cache coherence extensions are an excellent example of the productive cooperation we routinely achieve between member companies.  We are grateful for the tremendous effort and contributions provided by MIPS Technologies, and we thank them for their efforts,” said Ian Mackintosh, president OCP-IP.  “We are pleased to present them with the Outstanding Contributor Award and look forward to continued partnership in the future.”

For the latest information on OCP-IP please see our newsletter at http://www.ocpip.org/newsletters.php

About OCP-IP

Formed in 2001, OCP-IP is a non-profit corporation promoting, supporting and delivering the only openly licensed, core-centric protocol comprehensively fulfilling integration requirements of heterogeneous multicore systems.  The Open Core Protocol  (OCP) facilitates IP core reusability and reduces design time, risk, and manufacturing costs for all SoC and electronic designs by providing a comprehensive supporting infrastructure.  For additional background and membership information, visit www.OCPIP.org.