Posted: May 4, 1998

With Microsoft Corp. seemingly upgrading its CE operating system every quarter or so and MIPS Technologies Inc. spinning off into the embedded market, the future looks bright for microprocessor-core-provider SandCraft Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

The design-house-turned-core-vendor recently received strong financial backing from venture firms US Venture Partners and Wessels, Arnold and Henderson L.L.C and recorded its first multimillion-dollar win, licensing its 64-bit MIPS-based 5400-class embedded core to NEC Corp. With MIPS Technologies spinning off from SGI to re-enter the embedded-cores market, SandCraft's chief executive officer, Norman Yeung, believes MIPS-based microprocessor cores have huge growth potential on the embedded market.

"We welcome the MIPS spin-off," said Yeung "The MIPS process has been doing well and has been driven by market demand. Given that MIPS has spun out of SGI, it can now focus on proliferating the architecture."

MIPS' re-entry into embedded also roiled the cores arena. In the week before its spin-off announcement, MIPS sued MIPS-clone core vendor Lexra Inc. (Waltham, Mass.) in federal court in San Jose, charging among other things false advertising and trademark infringement.

Seemingly unworried about a MIPS lawsuit, Yeung's company works under the premise "if you have the MIPS license, we have the core."

SandCraft, unlike Lexra, offers its cores only to those companies holding MIPS manufacturing licenses. "As long as we do not manufacture and sell the chip, we are not breaking the law," said Yeung. "You can design anything, but the moment you manufacture, you better have a license."

Yeung said seven companies, including NEC, that now hold MIPS manufacturing licenses and 27 or so others with licenses for internal use are potential SandCraft customers.

"So far we have delivered a standalone processor to NEC," said Yeung. "NEC is going to take the core and do many things with it, including creating a 5432, a 32-pin cost-reduction core to lower the cost of the packaging and get better yields." Yeung said SandCraft is now creating its next-generation, 0.18-micron MIPS-based microprocessors. It will offer it as a standalone processor or processor core or customize it into an ASSP processor for its customers.

The 28-person company, founded in 1996, boasts an engineering staff of 25, five of whom were formerly involved with embedded-processor design at MIPS Technologies.

SandCraft, working with designers from NEC's advanced microprocessor group, produced NEC's VR5464 and two other VR5400 microprocessors in 16 months. The VR5464 was implemented in NEC's 0.25-micron technology and features a dual-issue superscalar architecture, multimedia extensions, floating-point capability, a 64-kbyte on-chip cache and a 64-bit data bus. NEC said the VR5464 delivers more than 500 Dhrystone Mips at 250 MHz.

"We have an experienced group that knows the embedded market," said Yeung. "In this space, you can't just design for performance, you have to design for performance, die size, yield, testability, and still meet time-to-market windows. You have to learn how to juggle all these together to make the system designers happy."