MIPS Technologies

MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications. MIPS was founded in 1984 to commercialize the work being carried out at Stanford University on the MIPS architecture, a pioneering RISC design. The company generated intense interest in the late 1980s, seeing design wins with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Silicon Graphics (SGI), among others. By the early 1990s the market was crowded with new RISC designs and further design wins were limited. The company was purchased by SGI in 1992, by that time its only major customer, and won several new designs in the game console space. In 1998, SGI announced it would be transitioning off MIPS and spun off the company. After several years operating as an independent design house, in 2013 the company was purchased by Imagination Technologies, best known for its PowerVR graphics processor family. They were sold to Tallwood Venture Capital in 2017 and then purchased less than a year later by Wave Computing. Wave declared bankruptcy in 2020, emerging in 2021 as MIPS and announcing that the MIPS architecture was being abandoned in favor of RISC-V designs. In May 2022, MIPS previewed its first RISC-V CPU IP cores, the eVocore P8700 and I8500 multiprocessors. In December 2022, MIPS announced availability of the P8700. In July 2025, MIPS was acquired by GlobalFoundries.