SiByte, Inc. Acquires License Agreement for MIPS Technologies' MIPS64 Architecture.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 13, 1999--

Led by Former Strong-ARM and Alpha CPU Architects,

New Fabless Semiconductor Firm to Create High Performance,

Communication SOC Solutions Based on MIPS Technologies'

Processor IP (Intellectual Property)

MIPS Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:MIPS) today announced that SiByte, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company focused on delivering very high performance SOC solutions for the Internet infrastructure equipment market, has licensed MIPS Technologies' MIPS64(TM) architecture.

"Among the community of computer processor designers and architects," notes John Bourgoin, MIPS Technologies' CEO. "Dan Dobberpuhl and his team are standouts. Their significant contributions to the industry include milestones such as the StrongARM, the Alpha, the uVAX and the PDP-11 processors. The fact that they have chosen MIPS64 as their processor architecture of choice highlights the advantages that the MIPS architecture has in the marketplace today. It is the highest performance, most scalable architecture, spanning a range that begins with the low-end 32-bit to the highest performance 64-bit processors."

"The MIPS64 architecture has become the preferred choice for high bandwidth communications because of the performance and the flexibility of the architecture," says Dan Dobberpuhl, president and founder of SiByte, Inc. "We also like the flexibility of MIPS Technologies' IP business model because it enables us to add value leveraging SiByte's world-class high-performance, low-power VLSI background by offering SOC solutions specific to our customers' needs."

"It is interesting that the former Digital Equipment Corp. semiconductor engineers primarily responsible for the Alpha and StrongARM have re-surfaced as MIPS Technologies' licensees," notes Tom R. Halfhill, an embedded analyst with Microprocessor Report. "SiByte was founded by Dan Dobberpuhl, who headed both the Alpha and the StrongARM developments, and Alchemy Microprocessor Design Group was founded by the other primary StrongARM architects. Both have now chosen to license the MIPS architecture instead of StrongARM. Based on the track record of these engineers, we can expect to see some efficient embedded processors with very strong performance and low power consumption."

"The beauty of MIPS Technologies' IP business model is its flexibility in allowing customers to add instructions and customize their MIPS-based cores to best fit their specific application," says Brian Knowles, vice president of marketing at MIPS Technologies. "It strengthens the entire MIPS community and benefits system OEMs to have SiByte's renown design team developing new high-performance, low-power, MIPS-compatible cores."

64-bit processor performance is a key enabler of next-generation high-performance communications systems. The additional bandwidth of 64-bit registers, 64-bit execution units, and 64-bit data paths accelerate important functions such as moving large data packets, stripping headers and re-inserting routing and control information, and executing encoding and decoding algorithms.

The new MIPS64 architecture streamlines and standardizes the key performance features of the MIPS processor architecture. It includes all of the functionality of the MIPS V(TM) ISA, including a set of 32 general-purpose registers, 64-bit floating-point registers and instructions, multi-stage pipelines and exception and protection mechanisms. A flat memory architecture provides a large linear memory address space for memory intensive applications and wide, fast system buses enable very high throughput in data-intensive applications.

SiByte is targeting very high performance operations while maintaining low in-system power consumption. This allows SiByte to deliver very high performance power constrained SOC solutions targeted at the Internet infrastructure equipment market. It is expected to deliver its first products in the later half of 2000.

About SiByte, Inc.

SiByte, Inc. is a privately held fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California and can be reached at 408-845-6600 or http://www.sibyte.com.

About MIPS Technologies, Inc.

MIPS Technologies, Inc. is the world's primary architect of embedded 32- and 64-bit RISC processors. The company drives the broadest architectural alliance that is delivering 32- and 64-bit embedded RISC solutions. The company licenses its intellectual property to semiconductor manufacturing companies, ASIC developers, and system OEMs. MIPS Technologies, Inc. and its licensees offer the widest range of robust, scalable processors in standard, custom, semi-custom and application-specific products.

Licensees currently include: Alchemy Microprocessor Design Group; ATI Technologies Inc.; Broadcom Corporation; Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing; CommQuest (IBM); ESS Technology, Inc.; General Instrument; Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT); Lara Technology; LSI Logic Corporation; Macronix; NEC Corporation; NKK Corporation; Philips Semiconductors; Quantum Effect Devices (QED); SandCraft, Inc.; Sony Corporation; SiByte, Inc; Synova; Texas Instruments Incorporated and Toshiba Corporation. Numerous companies utilize MIPS-based(TM) intellectual property. MIPS Technologies, Inc. is based in Mountain View, California, and can be reached at 650-567-5000 or http://www.mips.com.

MIPS-based is a trademark and MIPS is a registered trademark of MIPS Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. All press materials are available on the World Wide Web via: http://www.mips.com