Posted: 3:00 p.m. EST, 4/14/98

SAN JOSE, Calif. — MIPS Technology Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc., has filed a law suit in U.S. District Court against microprocessor-core startup Lexra Inc., claiming false advertising and trademark infringement. The suit was filed last Friday amid speculation that SGI would officially announce plans to spin off the MIPS subsidiary as an independent provider of cores.

In its legal filing against Lexra, MIPS contends that the company has misled the buying public by claiming Lexra's new 32-bit microprocessor core is "MIPS compatible." In addition, MIPS claims Lexra's use of the product designation LXR4080 for its microprocessor core infringes on MIPS' trademark of the MIPS RISC R4000 product family, which includes the registered-trademarked R4000 and R4400.

MIPS officials declined to comment directly on the legal action, but in a prepared statement, MIPS president John Bougoin said: "We believe that Lexra's unlicensed product cannot be MIPS-compatible without infringing MIPS patents. Conversely, if doesn't infringe our patents, then the MIPS-compatibility claim constitutes false advertising. "Either way, we want our customers to know that we will take strong action to protect them and to protect our intellectual property."

Bougoin further stated that MIPS is seeking access to Lexra's LXR4080 source code and that MIPS will expand the suit if it finds patent infringement.

Lexra licenses a 32-bit microprocessor core b ased on the MIPS-1 instruction set, which is now in the public domain. Lexra claims that its LXR4080 core was developed in a clean room and that the core does not contain MIPS' intellectual property .

"Their real intent of this filing is to get a look at our design and our intellectual property and dissect it," said Charlie Cheng, president and chief executive officer of Lexra. "They couldn't file a patent-infringement law suit. They went to Microprocessor Report and one of our licensees and found out there wasn't a patent infringement, so they decided to do this."

"We have clearly indicated in our product literature that we have left out the unaligned loads and store instructions," said Cheng, who pointed out a paragraph in the LXR4080 datasheet, dated Jan. 5, 1998: "The MIPS unaligned load and store instruction sets are not supported, because they represent poor price/performance trade-off for embedded applications and because their absence does not affect the software programming model."

Cheng further said the unaligned load and store instructions were omitted because they would not be used by Lexra's targeted licensee base. The instructions in question are used for older, Cobol programs. "MIPS has evolved into, first, an engineering-workstation processor and, now, an embedded processor for cellular-phone disk drives," said Cheng. "Everybody uses C compilers; nobody uses Cobol anymore."

The second claim made by MIPS against Lexra is reminiscent of the X86 trademark suit that Intel Corp. filed against Advanced Micro Devices Inc. years ago. The courts hearing that suit found that numbers could not be trademarked, and the case was thrown out.

"To refile the complaint that Intel has lost a long time ago is incredible. There should be a way to prevent these thing from happening," said Cheng. "The industry and the courts shouldn't allow large companies to bully small companies and prevent innovations. There are a lot of small companies in the IP industry that need to watch out for the big guys."

If Lexra's customers are sued by MIPS, Cheng said, they will be protected by Lexra from legal action, as the company offers customers indemnification, he said.

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