Chipmaker GlobalFoundries Acquires Chip Designer MIPS

GlobalFoundries has acquired chip design firm MIPS, creating a company that both designs and creates semiconductors.

The two companies announced the deal on Tuesday, without revealing how much money will change hands, but with the caveat that MIPS will “continue to operate as a standalone business within GF and serve its customers across a broad range of technologies.”

That means MIPS will likely be free to go about its business, which in recent years has focused on developing processor designs based on the permissively-licensed RISC-V instruction set architecture.

Companies like MIPS license their designs to companies that need chips designed for specific applications or want to build custom chips.

GlobalFoundries is happy to manufacture those chips – or indeed any other chip that someone wants to build – as is the case for most silicon foundry operators.

Owning its own chip designer means GlobalFoundries now has a broader offering. Or as CEO Niels Anderskouv put in in a canned statement, the acquisition means “We will expand our capabilities to offer customers more flexible solutions, paired with our differentiated process technologies and world-class manufacturing to help them build best-in-class products.”

That’s press-release-speak for “We know how to make great chips, and soon we’ll offer customers all our know-how applied to designs cooked up by MIPS.”

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MIPS recently announced a range of new processor cores called “Atlas” that it designed for real-time processing workloads and for running AI on edge devices.

It looks like GlobalFoundries has decided it wants that IP in its portfolio, making this acquisition a big bet on both RISC-V and AI.

It’s not hard to see why GlobalFoundries wants a good AI offering: The market is booming, and the likes of Broadcom are racing to create custom chips for giant clients.

RISC-V is, pardon the pun, a little riskier. The ISA’s permissive license has seen it compared to Linux, which came to dominate the server OS market. RISC-V boosters insist the same outcome is certain to eventuate for the ISA.

However it was only last year that RISC-V unified its instruction and added hypervisor extensions, changes that make it easier for developers to work with the ISA and bring it to parity with datacenter-dominators from AMD, Intel, and increasingly Arm.

The deal will conclude in the second half of 2025. After that we’ll see how GlobalFoundries uses MIPS to compete with Arm – arguably a direct competitor for MIPS as it offers advanced core and processor designs. The UK chip design champ is not, however, owned by a foundry. Intel is bolted to one in what looks like an increasingly loveless marriage. The combined GlobalFoundries and MIPS represents a novel union. Let’s see what it spawns. ®