Previously in December, Wave Computing who received developments and patents from MIPS Technologies following the bankruptcy of Imagination Technologies announced its intention to make the set of 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS commands, tools and architectures open and royalty-free. Wave Computing’s developer packages are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2019. And they did it! By the end of this week, the MIPS Open website has links to the MIPS R6 architecture/kernel and related tools and modules. Everything can be downloaded and used by yourself and you don’t have to pay for it. The company will continue to make the new kernels publicly available in the future.
The first free download packages include MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) Release 6, 32-bit and 64-bit instruction sets, MIPS SIMD extensions, MIPS DSP extensions, MIPS multi-threading support, MIPS MCU multithreading, MIPS MCU, microMIPS compression codes and MIPS virtualization. MIPS Open also includes the elements required to design MIPS kernels independently, such as MIPS Open Tools and MIPS Open FPGA.
The MIPS Open Tools element provides an integrated environment for developing embedded systems with real-time operating systems and products for embedded systems running Linux. It enables the developer to create, debug and deploy an individual project as a hardware and software platform for running applications. The MIPS Open FPGA Element is a training program (environment) for those who want to deepen their knowledge of the topic (architecture). First, MIPS Open FPGA was developed for students and supported by extensive reference materials about MIPS processors.
As a bonus to MIPS Open FPGA is the RTL code for future MIPS microAptiv kernels. These kernels will be announced later this year and will serve as an example for the non-commercial introduction to future products. These are small, energy-efficient cores that are expected to be released in a few weeks.