Five years ago, it was announced that Philips Electronics NV would fabricate variants of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc microprocessor (CI No 1,236), since when the story has vanished into a black hole and nothing more has been heard. Now however, the company’s Philips Semiconductors has popped up in a rival camp, buying a company that designs microcontrollers based on the MIPS Technologies Inc R3000 family of RISC microprocessors and taking over the acquisition’s licence to use the MIPS designs. It plans to take the microprocessor cores and combine them with specialised circuitry for a broad range of applications in consumer and embedded markets. The company Philips has acquired is HDL Systems Inc of Sunnyvale, California, a design company specialising in 32-bit microprocessor architectures for embedded applications; the value of the transaction was not disclosed. HDL Systems is claimed to be the first company to introduce a customisable MIPS processor to the embedded market with the MR300, described as one of the few MIPS cores that is a completely static design so that the clock can be stopped when the processor is idle, reducing power drain to zero. Philips now claims to be the world leader in the 8088-derived 8-bit 80C51 microcontrollers, leading the market in terms of dollar volume, units shipped, and number of derivatives including a new 16-bit extension of 8051 architecture. HDL designed the MR300 from the high-level MIPS architectural description as opposed to the physical design approach taken by other MIPS licensees, and that enabled it to make major architectural modifications to the MIPS design, while retaining full software-compatibility. The MR300 processor is being made and used in embedded applications in Japan.
