Santa Clara's MIPS and chipmaker NXP unveil ready-made chip kits meant to help companies build robots faster

Two chip companies announced new building blocks for robots on Nov. 9, ahead of electronica 2026, a large electronics trade show in Munich, according to their press releases.  MIPS, a Santa Clara chip-design company that is part of GlobalFoundries, a major chip manufacturer, introduced Actus, a chip platform meant to sit inside each joint of a robot arm or hand.  NXP Semiconductors, a chipmaker that reported $12.27 billion in 2025 revenue, released a robotics kit that starts with drones.

What a robot joint chip does

A humanoid robot's elbow, wrist and fingers each have a small motor.  Each motor needs a controller that tells it exactly how far and how hard to turn, many times a second.  MIPS says Actus puts that motor control, a small amount of AI and a network link on one chip, so every joint can trade position and force data with the robot's main computer on a fixed, predictable schedule.  It also includes security meant to resist future quantum computers, the company says.

Actus is built on RISC-V, an open, royalty-free set of basic chip instructions that any company can build on.  RISC-V began in 2010 as a research project at UC Berkeley, according to RISC-V International, the nonprofit that now manages it.  MIPS did not give a price or say when chips will ship.

NXP's drone-first kit

NXP says its kit lets developers get basic drone functions working within 30 minutes of opening the box.  It bundles reference designs, which are tested blueprints a company can copy, for flight control, sensors and motors.  The software works with ROS 2, a popular free toolkit for writing robot software.  The kit is available now, and versions for service robots and other machines are expected in the second half of 2027.  NXP did not list a price.

Robot makers can spend months getting separate parts to work together, NXP says, and its kit is meant to cut that to days or weeks.  Those claims are the companies' own.

Source:  MIPS press release and NXP press release, Nov. 9, 2026.