Intel could find itself negotiating a series of new ARM processor licences following the proposed acquisition of the mobile phone chip business of Infineon Technologies.
Intel has had licences for ARM11 MPCore and ARM946 for some time but Intel will now be talking to ARM about new licences for processor IP used in Infineon’s GSM and HSPA baseband chips.
The baseband chip business uses ARM926EJ-S, ARM7TDMI-S and ARM1176 processor IP under a licence held by former parent company Infineon Technologies.
Those licences will not move across with the acquisition so that Intel will have to negotiate new licence agreements with ARM.
“When a company sells a division they do not get the rights to pass on any ARM technology. It stays with the original company,” a spokesman for ARM told EW.
“However ARM will license the technology required on not unreasonable terms,” said the spokesman.
When asked whether Intel had approached ARM about new processor licences the spokesman said: “What technology Intel has licensed is confidential apart from ARM11 MPCore and ARM946 which Intel has disclosed.”
Intel’s existing ARM-based chips include the IXC1100 control plane processor based on the 533MHz XScale core, an ARM v.5TE compliant architecture.
It has now acquired XMM Dual Core baseband chips built on 200MHz dedicated ARM926EJ-S applications processor.
There are quad-channel EDGE chips using 150MHz DSP16000 and 100MHz ARM7TDMI-S processors.
The X-GOLD 618 HSPA chipset uses the ARM1176 embedded microcontroller.
Intel agreed to buy Infineon Technologies wireless chip business for $1.4bn last month.
Infineon does has design-ins with a number of big name mobile phone manufacturers.
"Infineon brings top-10 handset OEM relationships and valuable cellular radio modem expertise,” said Stephen Entwistle, v-p of strategic technology at market consultancy Strategy Analytics.
According to Entwhistle, Infineon is the 5th largest supplier of baseband chipsets to the mobile phone market, in revenue terms.