Ingenic Semiconductor


Ingenic Semiconductor is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Beijing, China founded in 2005. They purchased licenses for the MIPS architecture instruction sets in 2009 and design CPU-microarchitectures based on them. They also design system on a chip products including their CPUs and licensed semiconductor intellectual property blocks from third parties, such as Vivante Corporation, commission the fabrication of integrated circuits at semiconductor fabrication plants and sell them.

XBurst microarchitecture

The XBurst CPU microarchitecture is based upon the MIPS32 revision 1 respectively the MIPS32 revision 2 instruction set and implements an 8-stage pipeline. XBurst CPU technology consists of 2 parts:
Ingenic Semiconductor purchased a MIPS64 instruction set license and designed a microarchitecture based on it: XBurst2.
XBurst2 is a dual-issue/dual-threaded CPU design. Its development "will basically be completed" in the first half of 2014 as announced at Summer 2013.

XBurst1-based SoCs

SoCs incorporating the XBurst microarchitecture:

Adoption

XBurst1-based SoCs are commonly used in tablet computers, portable media players, digital photo frames and GPS devices:
The JZ4730 CPU is used in the Skytone Alpha-400 and its variants. The Jz4720 is utilized in the Copyleft Hardware project Ben NanoNote. Another popular device, the Dingoo gaming handheld, uses the JZ4732, a de facto JZ4740. Game Gadget is using the JZ4750. Velocity Micro T103 Cruz and T301 Cruz 7-Inch Android 2.0 Tablets used JZ4760. The JZ4770 SoC is used in several of the Ainol Novo 7 Android tablets and 3Q Tablet PC Qoo! IC0707A/4A40. JZ4770 SoC is also used in the dedicated handheld NEOGEO-X and open source handheld GCW Zero running on OpenDingux. The JZ4780 is used in ImgTec's MIPS based single-board computer ; The Creator CI20