MIPS and Wind River form center for embedded apps

MIPS and Wind River form center for embedded apps
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
June 13, 2000 (3:51 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000613S0071

SAN JOSE, Calif. — MIPS Technologies Inc. and Wind River Inc. have agreed to perform some joint engineering and marketing to align MIPS' embedded RISC processor architectures with Wind River's software development tools to support the development efforts of MIPS licensees, who may participate in the program. Licensee QED Inc. is the first company to sign up for the program.

MIPS (Mountain View, Calif.) and Wind River (Alameda, Calif.) said their three-year collaborative agreement will ensure that more complete MIPS processor-based platforms will be available earlier for digital consumer and networking markets.

The agreement with MIPS involves Wind River's second planned collaborative center of excellence. Wind River's first center was created with Intel Corp. to cover Pentium development.

As part of the latest agreement, which was announced prior to the Embedded Processor Forum here, Wind River and MIPS are to combine engineering and marketing resources to help port and distribute Wind River's Tornado software development platform and VxWorks real-time operating system to MIPS' 32-bit and 64-bit processor architectures.

"Our goal is to bring embedded developers best-of-breed solutions that really help the industry move faster and build more innovative applications," said John Bourgoin, chairman and chief executive officer of MIPS. "By working intimately with the market share embedded software leader Wind River, we believe that we can do that."

"Wind River created the center of excellence initiative because there was a clear need for closer ties between leading embedded semiconductor and software providers," said Jerry Fiddler, chairman of Wind River. "MIPS Technologies was the logical choice for us to partner with because of its strong reputation and high-performance, high-value microprocessors."

The deal is structured to allow MIPS Technologies' licen sees to join the program to ensure that their specific processors and development boards are supported.

The companies said coordinated product road maps will preserve current and future investments in technology. With such collaboration, for example, software would be optimized to take advantage of future MIPS processor architectures, the companies said.