<i>Quite literally MIPS Technologies being too busy with this litigation is the only good explanation why it was blind to the real threat: ARM7TDMI taking embedded&#x2F;telecom market by storm.</i><p>Case in point: in the first half of 2001 I worked at Lucent on a board that had something like 288 or more dial up modem channels (this was once a part of Ascend Communications).  It had a bunch of specialized Analog Devices chips doing the heavy lifting, a bunch of ARM processors controlling them ... and one MIPS processor doing system housekeeping.