nse their respective families of PowerPC series of CPU cores, and companies such as ARM (www.arm.com), which outsource their IP know-how through a large team of licensee semiconductor vendors. We even look at companies such as Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com/ microelectronics), which offer a family of Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC) CPUs and embedded Java processors. As of this writing, Lexra (www.lexra.com) was considered a leading contender of network- processing IP, especially when compared with companies like Tensilica and ClearSpeed. A major law- suit was brought against Lexra by MIPS for the alleged inappropriate use of MIPS's instruction set. This was finally settled, and Lexra had to formally license the MIPS instruction set. Part of the oner- ous agreement was that Lexra could not engage in IP licensing anymore. Instead, the company have to design a full-fledged NPU chip that may be available later in 2003-that is, if the company survives the financial turmoil. Lexra technology is therefore not included in this chapter. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO NETWORK PROCESSING: NET ASICS AND DESIGNING WITH IP CORES ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO NETWORK PROCESSING: NET ASICS AND DESIGNING WITH IP CORES MIPS TECHNOLOGIES MIPS (www.mips.com) is a startup that was originally set up to commercialize technology that was based on pioneering research that Professor John L. Hennessy and his associates had done in the early 1980s at Stanford University. MIPS was later bought by Silicon Graphics and then spun off again an independent company. It is one of the few undisputed powerhouses in reduced instruction set com- puter (RISC) technology. In the last 15 years or so, it has managed to propel itself to one of the pre- eminent global positions in the embedded CPU market. Through the extremely wide acceptanc