US VC partners return MIPS to Silicon Valley

MIPS, provider of the eponymous processor architecture and IP cores, is once again in Silicon Valley, following the acquisition of MIPS from Imagination Technologies by Tallwood Venture Capital and Paxion Capital Partners.

Tallwood’s managing director, Dado Banatao and Nicholas Brathwaite, founding partner of Riverwood Capital and WRV Capital, will represent Paxion on the board of directors. John Hennessy, former president of Stanford University and an original co-founder of MIPS Computer Systems, Pradeep Sindhu, founder and chief scientist of Juniper Networks, and Steve Fu, former chief strategy officer of Fairchild Semiconductors, will all serve on MIPS’ technical advisory board.

MIPS CPUs are found in set-top boxes and DTV, networking switches and routers, robotics, the IoT and LTE modems. The MIPS architecture is also used in most of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for autonomous vehicles.

Banatao said: “As the first commercially available RISC architecture, MIPS played a key role in making computing ubiquitous, and in the development of the fabless semiconductor model. We are excited to bring MIPS back to its roots in Silicon Valley and are committed to driving the company forward as it continues to play a key role in the next era of computing.”

“With the emergence of AI (artificial intelligence) in applications that will touch all of our lives in ways we can’t yet begin to fathom, this is an incredibly exciting time to see MIPS position themselves in the epicenter of the AI universe,” said Hennessy. “Because of its initial simplicity, efficiency, and extensibility, the MIPS architecture has been able to continuously evolve over the years to incorporate new architectural concepts, providing advantages for an ever-changing range of applications. I believe AI will be no exception. Under Dado’s stewardship, MIPS can grow to become the processing architecture of choice for a new generation of intelligent applications.”