Clip Nick Flaherty

1328 words

Jul 19 2006

Electronics Weekly

English

(c) Copyright 2006. Reed Business Information Limited. All rights reserved.

A new player has emerged in the microprocessor business with a portfolio of patents to take on the industry, just as some of the earliest patents on Risc processors expire.

The Moore Microprocessor Patent (MMP) portfolio is named after Charles Moore, the inventor of the Forth programming language, rather than Gordon Moore of Intel. While some of the first Risc processor patents come to an end this year, the Moore patents date from 1989 and will run until 2012 at the earliest.

Although they have been around for over 15 years, the Moore patents have had a chequered history. Up until last year there was a dispute on who owned them - a company called the TPL Group in Cupertino, California, where Moore is chief technology officer, or Patriot Scientific in Carlsbad, California.

That was resolved last June, when the two agreed to co-operate, and since then TPL has been marketing the portfolio through its subsidiary Alliacense. These have been taken up by companies such as Intel and AMD, as well as Hewlett Packard, Casio and, in early June, Sony.

``This is a very important announcement for the MMP Licensing Programme,`` says Mac Leckrone, president and CEO of Alliacense. ``Sony is one of the most well known and widely respected companies in the world and we welcome them to our growing roster of MMP licensees.``

Alliacense is currently in discussions with dozens of companies, and the firm says that competition for early-round licensing berths in key market sectors has become intense. ``The MMP Portfolio Licensing Programme rewards first movers in their industry sectors with substantial discounts,`` says Leckrone.

The three key patents cover clocking the CPU and I/O separately, the use of multiple cores and embedded memory, and multiple Instruction Fetch. But not everyone thinks they are that important.

``It`s a very particular form of high speed clocks which people have said are very rarely used in actual designs,`` says Chris Rowen, CEO of Tensilica and one of the founders of MIPS Technologies who worked on the original Risc technology at Stanford University. ``I don`t think these patents are very fundamental at all.``

Tensilica has recently been granted its own patent on techniques for generating a configurable processor at the same time as the programming tools, but is not looking to do the same. ``We have a very strong patent portfolio but we don`t have lawyers,`` says Rowen.

Other processor designers are also not impressed.

``We spent a lot of effort looking at the patents and we are quite happy that we don`t infringe,`` says Mike Muller, chief technology officer and one of the founders of processor designer ARM.

``I think things like this group of patents occur every few years,`` says Muller. ``A few years back Intergraph had a collection of patents which was all it had left. The difference is that once it becomes a fundamental asset of a company, the rules of the game change. In normal business there`s tit-for-tat and room for cross licensing.``

``These kinds of topics are not ones that we should have discussion in public,`` says Jack Browne, vice-president of sales and marketing for MIPS.

TPL is not only looking to license microprocessor designers but also the system makers to cover themselves when using other devices such as graphics chip that may also infringe the patents.

Pricing

``My interpretation, and it is speculation, is the licensing strategy is to make the initial price very low to make it not worth an engineer looking at the patents,`` says Rowen at Tensilica. ``I think there`s always a pricing strategy around patents. With any patent campaign you raise the price as time goes on as you get validation.``

``If you look at some of the people that have settled, the amount they have paid is comparable to the amount it would have cost to defend a case,`` says ARM`s Muller. ``Corporations settle as a way of putting it to bed without believing they infringe.``

As a private company, TPL would not comment on pricing except to say that it offers steep discounts for the early signers. ``This is a pivotal time for the MMP licensing program,`` says David Pohl, chairman and CEO of Patriot Scientific. ``The MMP Portfolio Licensing Programme rewards first movers in their industry sectors with substantial discounts. Sony was successful in achieving this distinct honour.``

Another processor designer, ARC, has used its recent patent on generating a reconfigurable processor from a database to start licensing its tools. ``We want to promote the wider adoption of configurability and as the fundamental patent holder we want that to expand,`` says Carl Schlachte, CEO of ARC. ``The fact is that somebody needs to lead while there`s the opportunity and we chose to do that with Toshiba. It`s a fundamental strategic shift.``

Nuclear weapons

That highlights the commercial element to the patents.

``A patent is a fundamental part of anyone`s arsenal and has influence in the game regardless of whether you use them as a weapon or not,`` says Rowen. ``Microprocessor Report compared the patents to nuclear weapons, where you would rather keep them in the ground.``

And TPL has moved on from being a licensing company into products. The company has recently acquired two other companies that have patent portfolios and products in the memory controller area, and plans to license these patents. Yet another part of the group is Intellasys, where Moore has been developing a processor made up of an array of stack-based 18-bit execution units that run the Forth language natively. The $10 chip, launched at the Spring Processor Forum, will ship later this year, but ironically does not use a clock and so is not subject to the patent portfolio.

``Asynchronous is a good thing - in this case there`s no clock but delay lines to time things,`` says Moore. ``It buys you scalability and allows you to work closer to the limit of the silicon rather than the limit of the clock.``

Expiring patents

While some of the earliest Risc processor patents are coming to an end, the companies are not unduly worried.

``Some of the patents do expire later this year in the US but that`s why we file around the world,`` says Browne at MIPS. ``The semiconductor business is global and our customers need global rights. We have over 100 patents today and of the order of another 100 patent applications around the world, so when you have a discussion with a customer they license the product technology that includes the patent rights and the trade secrets.``

This is because it is more about the software compatibility. ``Over the years we have seen many, many companies fall on their swords because being almost compatible doesn`t cut it,`` he says. ``The more overriding thing is the trade secrets that, when you do the implementation of the microprocessor ensures the code is compatible, and trade secrets have no expiry date.``

A sentiment which is echoed by Muller at ARM.

``One of the things we have been doing over the last 20 years is inventing new extensions to the architecture with new patents and so that patent portfolio has been refreshed,`` explains Muller. ``I looked at our patent portfolio and we have nearly 800 patents and around 1,000 applications. The percentage of applications was 20 per cent for architecture whereas the percentage of granted [architecture patents] was less than 15 per cent, so the amount of architectural patents has gone up.``

But TPL is not stopping with the Moore patents. Patents being filed now at Intellasys will form the basis of a Moore Array Patent portfolio which will be used in the same way as the Moore Microprocessor Patent portfolio, targeting both the developers and users of multi-core processors.