TAIPEI, Taiwan –Lantiq, a leading supplier of broadband access and home networking technologies, announced it is a founding member of the prpl foundation, a non-profit open source initiative. The foundation is an open-source community-driven, collaborative, non-profit organization targeting and supporting the MIPS architecture—and open to others—with a focus on enabling next-generation ‘datacenter to device’ portable software and virtualized architectures.
Lantiq is contributing to the foundation to further extend the software ecosystem around the MIPS architecture for communications infrastructure enabling advanced System-on-Chip (SoC) devices for the connected home and Internet-of-Things (IoT).
An important principle behind prpl (pronounced “Purple”) is portability, with the goal of allowing for code to be written once and deployed to many devices – regardless of architecture. By encouraging portable software (JITs, emulation, binary translation), prpl enables developers to innovate on their core strengths. Lantiq strongly supports this vision, as one of the key ecosystem requirements for the Internet-of-Things to be successful is a reduced dependency on instruction set architecture (ISA) compatibility. With so many types of devices – from data center to embedded systems – there’s a need to ensure fragmentation doesn’t get in the way of innovation.
As a leader in offering semiconductor solutions for Broadband Communications, Lantiq actively drives the evolution of broadband Gateways and Routers into the central hub of the connected home, enabling cloud based services and IoT. With more than 280 million units shipped in 2014,* this market is as big as 25 percent of the global mobile/smart phone market and steadily growing.
The prpl foundation will contribute to further growth and importance of this market, enabling fast and innovative new MIPS based designs. Within the prpl foundation Lantiq will deliver innovation in efficiency, portability and compatibility for the benefit of a broad community of developers, businesses and consumers.
“We are delighted to be working with Lantiq as one of the technology leaders in the prpl foundation, to further develop the MIPS ecosystem,” said Imagination CEO Hossein Yassaie. “Companies in the networking domain and beyond will profit from the considerable combined resources and open source innovations created by some of the best minds of the member companies and developer participants.”
“We are exciting to provide value to the prpl foundation, based on our rich experience and large footprint in the broadband communications industry,” said Dan Artusi, CEO of Lantiq, in a Keynote speech he gave at the Imagination Summit 2014 in Santa Clara. “We believe that with the prpl open source initiative Imagination Technologies enters the next step in enabling their customers to offer highly competitive and leading edge networking solutions – based on MIPS Cores.”
