MIPS and Texas Instruments Get Behind The SPIRIT Consortium with Dedicated Engineering Support

-- Companies Become Contributing Members --

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 16, 2007 – The SPIRIT Consortium™, a global non-profit organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design, today announced that MIPS Technologies Inc. and Texas Instruments (TI) have officially become The SPIRIT Consortium’s most recent Contributing Members. Both the companies and The Consortium recognize this significant engineering commitment. MIPS and TI will actively participate in The Consortium by dedicating engineering resources to its technical working groups, whose aim is to better enable the re-use of design IP in multi-vendor flows.

The addition of MIPS and TI to The Consortium’s Contributing Members brings the number of companies directly contributing to the organization’s IP-XACT™ specification to 14. The IP-XACT specification enables the creation of a commonly understood design-and-language neutral description of component or systems architecture for exchange between design tools in RTL implementation and verification flows.

"The SPIRIT Consortium is very pleased by the commitment shown by TI and MIPS in becoming Contributing Members," said Ralph von Vignau, president, The SPIRIT Consortium. "This demonstrates that the IP-XACT specification is recognized as providing direct value to the industry. Along with the existing committed members of The Consortium, these two high profile companies who represent the IP provider and IDM industries, understand that only through industry standards can we reach the design and automation efficiency needed to beat the challenge of Moore's Law."

“MIPS is proud to have upgraded to a Contributing Membership so that we can directly participate in the development of The SPIRIT Consortium standards,” said Michael Uhler, chief technology officer, MIPS. “MIPS will actively participate in The Consortium developments to support architectural descriptions for debuggers as well as more detailed register descriptions.”

“As TI and its major customers are developing SoCs which are among the most complex in the world and which integrate an impressive variety of IPs from both internal and external sources, we have decided to join The SPIRIT Consortium as a Contributing Member,” said Loic Le Toumelin, SoC Development Methodology Director, Wireless Division, TI. “The SPIRIT Consortium is creating and supplying the auto-generation and machine-readable specifications needed to solve some of the major design productivity issues in the industry today. We are looking to adopt and to enrich the IP-XACT standards by contributing in the areas of IP-XACT for debugger target descriptions as well as IP-XACT in ESL design.”

About The Consortium
The SPIRIT Consortium is a global organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design. It is comprised of leading EDA, IP, system integration, and semiconductor companies dedicated to the adoption of a unified set of specifications for configuring, integrating, and verifying IP in advanced SoC design tool sets. For more information on The SPIRIT Consortium and its goals, please visit www.spiritconsortium.org.