Last week I wrote a column about how Mentor acquired Embedded Alley, and one of the key reasons for that acquisition was an entree into Android. This week, MIPS Technologies announced that the source code for its Android port is publicly available.

Visit www.mips.com/android to get a link to the open source site where you can register to become a part of the “Android on MIPS” developer community and download the code.

As I said last week, Android is likely to find a home in environments well beyond the handset, and this announcement from MIPS is evidence to that statement. The port to the MIPS architecture has the potential to push Android into higher performance applications.