ARM: What next? Richard Ball Following the recent additions of Lucent Technologies and Philips, Advanced Risc Machines (ARM) has now licensed its microprocessor cores to nearly 20 major semiconductor companies. With few large companies left to license the cores, the question now is how does ARM expect to continue its growth? Robin Saxby, president and CEO of ARM told Electronics Weekly that he sees growth potential in repeat licences. "We
license CPU cores, for example the ARM7TDMI. At the next layer up, we license microprocessors such as the ARM710 and the SA-110." These integrate cache and memory management units. "Above that we license system chip solutions - the ARM7500FE and ARM7100. People tend to start with a core, then come back for more," said Saxby. "Usually we don't talk about this repeat business." VLSI Technology, he says, started with an ARM6 licence and progressed
to ARM7 and ARM8. This is just the cores. Processor and system chip licences are in addition. Services and tools also contribute to Saxby's empire. "Each time Mentor sells a seat of Seamless [its co-verification tool], ARM gets revenue." When ARM started out, Saxby's plan was to have three major licensees, but a lack of product royalty revenue meant more licence deals were sought to fund the business. VLSI Technology was one of the original three. Jeff Hendy, VP of strategic marketing, said: "For us, ARM was expected to be a major differentiator. The way the licensing has gone is not the way we first expected." In spite of the numerous licensees, ARM faces considerable competition in the embedded Risc market. Last year it and its partners shipped considerably less Risc units than the leading two: MIPS and Hitachi. With key partners in NEC, Philips and Toshiba, MIPS has had considerable success in the games market. Meanwhile, Hitachi has been successful with its SuperH (SH) family. Moreover, the lack of Windows CE compatibility for the ARM makes Hitachi's SH4 a better option for portable products, claims VLSI's Hendy.