MIPS, the microprocessor IP licensing company, sees last year's acquisition of Portuguese IC design house, ChipIdea, as a route into the wireless handset market, and it sees video-to-the-handset as the opportunity for it to get its cores into mobile phones.

"ChipIdea has a substantial position in the wireless market that's an important future direction for MIPS," John Bourgoin, CEO of MIPS, told Electronics Weekly.

Asked what MIPS could bring to the handset giving it an opportunity to get into that market, Bourgoin replied: "In the process of convergence, a company wanting to do video might provide the entry-point."

MIPS has a good position in digital TV and set top boxes, and sees video as a core competence. Bourgoin reckons its cores can match ARM's in power performance, though he concedes: "We don't have the system power management capability that ARM has, but we're going to improve it."

Helping MIPS to achieve that improvement in its system power management expertise will, expects Bourgoin, be ChipIdea's analogue expertise. ChipIdea designed the analogue baseband chip used in Icera's Livanto HSDPA chip.

Asked how he saw MIPS' chances in going up against Intel's Atom in the smartphone/MID market, Bourgoin replied: "Intel's business model is a problem for them. They may have to start selling processors as cores"

The idea of anyone in the wireless industry wanting to buy a single-sourced processor when it can get processors from multiple competing sources, seems bizarre. In this respect MIPS' licensing business model should help its aspirations in the wireless industry.

MIPS already has a foothold in the wireless business having been adopted as the processor which Broadcom uses in its 802.11 chip-sets. Broadcom is the No.1 802.11 chip-set vendor having dominated the infrastructure end of the WiFi industry, while Intel dominated the laptop end.

A key task for MIPS is successfully handling the move to multi-core processors. "We stand or fall", said Bourgoin, "depending on whether we succeed in making our cores easier to use."