GlobalFoundries’s acquisition of MIPS, a storied San Jose, California, firm that has been working with reduced instruction set computer (RISC) technology for more than 40 years, will give both companies a stronger hand to play in the increasingly competitive RISC-V market.
The deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed, comes as MIPS has faced mounting competitive pressure from Arm, and also has drifted among different owners throughout the last decade.
“MIPS has had a rough time the past few years as ARM has come on strong in its market areas for devices, IoT, Industrial, etc.,” said Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, in an e-mail exchange with Fierce Electronics. “Its proprietary tech was getting a bit old. It recently moved to RISC-V as a way to try and get ahead of the market, with RISC-V growth in the smaller device and industrial space. But it’s certainly not alone in the RISC-V space. So I think it was looking for some deeper pocket support, and GF has much deeper pockets.”
The RISC-V market is taking off, as Mordor Intelligence noted in a recent research report. Estimated to be a $1.41 billion this year, it is expected to surge at a compound annual growth rate of 37.85% in the next five years to about $7 billion, with IoT opportunities accounting for a large chunk of the market, Mordor said. As the fifth version of the open standard RISC instruction set architecture, RISC-V’s strengths have been observed to be modularity, security support, and “straightforward optimization of hardware and software interactions,” according to RISC-V International.
The RISC-V processor IP expansion Gold spoke of had to do with the launch of MIPS’ Atlas portfolio, a comprehensive suite of compute cores designed for real-time and application processing as well as specialized AI edge processing cores. Additionally, MIPS also introduced Atlas Explorer, a virtual platform that enables optimization of performance, power and area to shift-left in the design cycle, according to the press release GlobalFoundries issued as it announced the acquisition.Â
Gold added, “From GF’s perspective, the RISC-V IP that MIPS brings lets it offer its customers a starting point to build new chips. GF is not really a leading-edge fab like TSMC, so its primary customer base is more associated with higher-volume and lower-performance chips – a place where MIPS and RISC-V play well… GF probably sees this as when MIPS gets a new customer, GF gets the foundry work, so it’s really about increased production capability.”
Although much coverage of this acquisition centered on the deal as one made primarily with edge AI and physical AI–and GlobalFoundries mentioned AI in the first sentence of its press release–Gold did not view it as an AI-driven move.
“This really isn’t that much about AI since RISC really doesn’t play at any high level there, although it can in certain lower end edge devices. MIPS and RISC-V are really more about chips on/around the periphery of AI, or at the very low levels of AI… Still, there is a low level AI capability being built into industrial products, sensors, etc., where they can play well, and especially since RISC-V [as an open standard] doesn’t have a license cost like ARM does.”
For GF’s part, Niels Anderskouv, president and COO at GlobalFoundries, stated, “MIPS brings a strong heritage of delivering efficient, scalable compute IP tailored for performance-critical applications, which strategically aligns with the evolving demands of AI platforms across diverse markets. Through this acquisition, we will expand our capabilities to offer customers more flexible solutions, paired with our differentiated process technologies and world-class manufacturing to help them build best-in-class products. This acquisition will be a powerful step forward to push the boundaries of efficiency and performance across a broad range of applications in automotive, industrial and datacenter infrastructure.” Â