ARM Holdings plc is a British multinational semiconductor and software design company
with its head office in Cambridge, England. Its largest business is designing processors
bearing the ARM name, although it also designs software development tools under the DS-5,
RealView and Keil brands, systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip infrastructure and software.
It is considered to be market dominant in the field of processors for mobile phones
and tablet computers and is arguably the best-known of the 'Silicon Fen' companies.
Processors based on designs licensed from ARM, or designed by licensees of one of the
ARM instruction set architectures, are used in all classes of computing devices from microcontrollers
in embedded systems – including real-time safety systems, smartTVs and all modern smartwatches
– up to smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, servers and supercomputers/HPC.
ARM's Mali line of graphics processing units is used in laptops, Android tablets and smartphones
and smartwatches. It is third most popular in mobile devices.
ARM's main CPU competitors include Intel, Imagination Technologies and AMD, and its
GPU competitors include Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm and increasingly Nvidia and Intel.
Qualcomm and Nvidia combine their GPUs with an ARM licensed CPU while Intel doesn't.
ARM has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE
100 Index. It has a secondary listing on NASDAQ.
History Name
The acronym ARM, first used in 1983, originally stood for "Acorn RISC Machine", the processor
from Acorn Computers, its first RISC processor used in the original Acorn Archimedes and
one of the first RISC processors. However, when the company was incorporated in 1990,
the acronym was changed to stand for "Advanced RISC Machines" in the company name "Advanced
RISC Machines Ltd." Then, at the time of the IPO in 1998, the company name was changed
to "ARM Holdings", often just called ARM just as the processors.
Founding The company was founded in November 1990 as
Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers,
Apple Computer and VLSI Technology. The new company intended to further the development
of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes
and had been selected by Apple for their Newton project. Its first profitable year was 1993.
The company's Silicon Valley and Tokyo offices were opened in 1994. In 1997, ARM invested
in Palmchip Corporation to provide a system on chip platforms and to enter into the disk
drive market. In 1998 the Company changed its name from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd to
ARM Ltd. The Company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998.
Apple's shareholding had fallen to 14.8% by February 1999.
In 2010, ARM joined with IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Freescale Semiconductor
in forming a Not For Profit Open Source engineering company, Linaro.
Acquisitions 1999
Micrologic Solutions, a software consulting company based in Cambridge
2000 Allant Software, a developer of debugging
software Infinite Designs, a design company based in
Sheffield EuroMIPS a smart card design house in Sophia
Antipolis, France 2001
The engineering team of Noral Micrologics, a debug hardware and software company based
in Blackburn, UK 2003
Adelante Technologies of Belgium, creating its OptimoDE data engines business, a form
of lightweight DSP engine 2004
Axys Design Automation, a developer of ESL design tools and Artisan Components, a designer
of Physical IP, the building blocks of integrated circuits
2005 KEIL Software, a leading developer of software
development tools for the microcontroller market, including 8051 and C16x platforms.
ARM also acquired the engineering team of PowerEscape.
2006 Falanx, a developer of 3D graphics accelerators
and SOISIC, who specialise in developing silicon-on-insulator physical IP
2011 Obsidian Software Inc., a privately held company
that creates processor verification products Prolific, a developer of automated layout
optimisation software tools, and the Prolific team will join the ARM physical IP team
2013 Internet of Things startup Sensinode
Cadence’s PANTA family of high-resolution display processor and scaling coprocessor
IP cores Operations
Business model Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers,
such as: Intel, Freescale and Renesas, ARM only creates and licenses its technology as
intellectual property, rather than manufacturing and sellIng its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs
or microcontrollers. This model is similar to fellow British design houses: ARC International,
and Imagination Technologies who have similarly been designing and licensing GPUs, CPUs, and
SoCs, along with supplying tooling and various design and support services to their licensees.
Facilities The company has offices and design centres
across the world, including San Jose, California, Austin, Texas, and Olympia, Washington in
the United States; Bangalore in India; Trondheim in Norway; Lund in Sweden; Sophia Antipolis
in France; Munich in Germany; Yokohama in Japan; China, Taiwan, and Slovenia.
Technology A characteristic feature of ARM processors
is their low electric power consumption, which makes them particularly suitable for use in
portable devices. In fact, almost all modern mobile phones and personal digital assistants
contain ARM CPUs, making them the most widely used 32-bit microprocessor family in the world.
Today ARMs account for over 75% of all 32-bit embedded CPUs.
ARM processors are used as the main CPU for most mobile phones, including those manufactured
by Apple, HTC, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung; many PDAs and handhelds, like the Apple iPod
and iPad, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, Game Park GP32 and GamePark Holdings GP2X;
as well as many other applications, including GPS navigation devices, digital cameras, digital
televisions, network devices and storage. The WLAN processor of Sony's PlayStation Portable
is an older ARM9. Licensees
ARM offers several microprocessor core designs that have been "publicly licensed" 830 times
including 117 times for their newer "application processors" used in such applications as smartphones
and tablets. Six of those companies have a license for the their most powerful processor
core, the 64-bit Cortex-A57 and four have a license to their most powerful 32-bit core,
the Cortex-A15. Cores for 32-bit architectures include Cortex-A15,
Cortex-A12, Cortex-A17, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A5, and older "Classic
ARM Processors", as well as variant architectures for microcontrollers that include these cores:
ARM Cortex-R7, ARM Cortex-R5, ARM Cortex-R4, ARM Cortex-M4, ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-M1,
ARM Cortex-M0+, and ARM Cortex-M0 for licencing; the three most popular licensing models are
the "Perpetual License", "Term License" and "Per Use License".
Companies often license these designs from ARM to manufacture and integrate into their
own System on chip with other components such as GPUs or radio basebands.
In addition to licenses for their core designs, ARM offers an "architectural license" for
their instruction sets, allowing the licensees to design their own cores that implement one
of those instruction sets. An ARM architectural licence is more costly than a regular ARM
core licence, and also requires the necessary engineering power to design a CPU based on
the instruction set. Processors believed to be designed independently
from ARM, by vendors for whom no architecture license has been announced, include Apple's
A6, A6X, and A7, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon. ARM core licensees
Companies that are current licensees of the 64-bit ARMv8-A core designs include: AMD,
AppliedMicro, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Rockchip, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics.
Companies that are current or former licensees of 32-bit ARM core designs include AMD, Broadcom,
Freescale, Huawei, IBM, Infineon Technologies, Intel, LG, NXP Semiconductors, Renesas, Rockchip,
Samsung, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments. ARM architectural licensees
Companies with a 64-bit ARMv8-A architectural licence include: Broadcom, Cavium, and Huawei.
Companies with a 32-bit ARM architectural licence include: Broadcom, Faraday Technology,
Marvell Technology Group, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Mali licensees
Companies that are current licensees of the Mali GPU designs include: Rockchip, Allwinner,
Samsung. Sales and market share
ARM-based CPU market share in 2010: over 95% in smartphone market; 10% in mobile computers;
35% in digital TVs and set-top boxes; however, ARM did not have any market share in servers
and desktop PCs. As of 2014, over 50 billion ARM chips have
been produced, 10 billion of which were produced in 2013, and "ARM-based chips are found in
nearly 60 percent of the world’s mobile devices".
In the fourth quarter of 2010, 1.8 billion chips based on an ARM design were manufactured.
With Microsoft's ARM-based Windows 8 OS, market research firm IHS predicted that in 2015 23%
of all the PCs in the world will use ARM processors. In May 2012, Dell announced the Copper platform,
a server based on Marvell’s ARM powered devices. In October 2012, ARM announced the
first set of early licensees of the 64-bit-capable Cortex-A57 processor.
ARM's goal is by 2015 to have ARM-based processors in more than half of all tablets, mini-notebooks
and other mobile PCs sold.
Partnerships Microsoft
At 2011 CES, Microsoft revealed that Windows 8 operating system will run on ARM architecture
platforms. Following this, Microsoft demonstrated Internet Explorer 10. For around 30 seconds
of the 90-minute talk, they mentioned that some of the demos were running on an ARM computer.
During Microsoft's presentation of Windows 8 on 1 June 2011, a handful of the company's
hardware partners showed off tablets and notebooks running the OS, including ARM instead of Intel
or AMD. University of Michigan
In 2011, ARM renewed a five-year, $5 million research partnership with University of Michigan,
which extended their existing research partnership to 2015. This partnership will focus on ultra-low
energy and sustainable computing. Senior management
Warren East was appointed Chief Executive Officer of ARM Holdings in October 2001. In
the 2011 financial year, East received a total compensation of £1,187,500 from ARM, comprising
a salary of £475,000 and a bonus of £712,500. East said in March 2013 that he would retire
from ARM in May, with president Simon Segars taking over as CEO. In March 2014, former
Rexam chairman Stuart Chambers succeeded John Buchanan as chairman. Chambers, a non-executive
director of Tesco and former chief executive of Nippon Sheet Glass Group, had previously
worked at Mars and Royal Dutch Shell. See also
Imagination Technologies ARC International
References
External links Official website