The one-line statement, “BOPS Inc. has ceased operations,” is all that remains at www.BOPS.com. Although there was no formal announcement of BOPS’s demise, the company’s closure has been common knowledge for some months.
In an interesting development, recent reports—as yet unconfirmed—suggest that BOPS’ assets, including its extensive patent portfolio, have been acquired by FPGA giant Altera. Altera has not announced any such acquisition and, when asked, the company declined to comment.
Such an acquisition would not be completely surprising. Altera, like its primary competitor, Xilinx, has focused significant attention in recent years on adding DSP-oriented architecture features to its FPGAs and on building up the associated development infrastructure. In addition to DSP-oriented architecture features such as fixed-function multipliers and distributed memory blocks, both Altera and Xilinx already offer embedded processor cores in their FPGAs. Altera emphasizes its home-grown “Nios” processor, offered as a soft core; Xilinx emphasizes the PowerPC, offered as a hard core embedded alongside the FPGA fabric. Both of these cores are general-purpose processors, intended to handle control tasks while the rest of the FPGA handles parallelizable DSP algorithms, for example. In addition, Altera has in recent months been promoting its “Code: DSP” initiative, a methodology for implementing DSP applications by using the Nios core in combination with DSP coprocessors built using the FPGA fabric.
One possible motivation for Altera to buy the BOPS assets is a desire to embed a BOPS ManArray DSP core in Altera FPGA products. But a more likely motivation is stockpiling DSP-processor-related patents as a weapon in future patent conflicts. As Altera and its ilk increasingly move into applications and architectures that were formerly the exclusive domain of DSP processor vendors, conflicts over intellectual property rights are to be expected. Acquiring BOPS patents and assets, if indeed Altera has done so, may help the company come out on the winning side of such future conflicts.
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