There is a little giant known as ARM Holdings that produces low-power processors. Arm is a UK-based company which provides licenses for microchip designs to many of the world’s major producers of semiconductors. These microchips serve as the brain of mobile devices like phones, cameras, TV sets, toys, and even cars.
By providing these microchips, Arm is known as the world’s leading supplier of intellectual property (IP). The development of digital electronic devices is dependent, to a large extent, on IPs. Such is the motivation of the 2,000 workers employed at Arm’s headquarters in Cambridge, UK and other design centers in Taiwan, India, France, Sweden and the US.
Since the establishment of the company in 1990, Arm has shipped no less than 200 billion pieces of microchips and sold 800 processor licenses to 250 companies. The company’s revenues are derived from the license fees and royalties they received from the chips.
This is the innovative edge of Arm. Instead of manufacturing and selling microchips, they design and license the IPs to manufacturers of semiconductors they call Partners. These Partners use the chips in producing their own line of products while paying Arm the license fee for the original IP including its design, and royalty for every chip produced out of the prototype. In addition to IPs, Arm also supplies tools and system IPs to optimize system-on-chip designs.
As Arm continues to diversify its IPs and as support for software of Arm-based solutions increase, Arm technology is used by many of the world’s leading Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). These EOMs include producers of mobile handsets, digital set top boxes, car braking systems and network routers.
Many of today’s mobile devices are recipients of this bright idea. To date, 90% of smart phones, 80% of digital cameras, and 28% of all other electronic devices use Arm technology.
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