Comment Articles

ARM chips: A very British monopoly

Michael Kanellos CNET News.com

Published: 09 Jul 2004 16:11 BST

Imagine a company that controls more than 80 percent of its segment of the mobile phone market and has 40 percent of the digital camera market. Now it wants to expand its reach in consumer electronics. Many would consider it predatory -- even a monopolist.

Somehow, though, Cambridge-based ARM just doesn't give people the willies the same way behemoths like Microsoft or Intel do. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone spouting "ARM is evil! EVIL!!!" in a chatroom.

The chip designer, though, is fairly pervasive. Now that Sony Ericsson has adopted ARM chips for its phones, more than 80 percent of the wireless handsets on the market run on processors based on ARM designs, said Mike Inglis, the company's executive vice president of marketing.

Chips based on the ARM designs have been incorporated into high-definition televisions by four of the five largest digital TV manufacturers. They're being used by several network equipment makers, camera makers and others, and Apple has put them in its iPod.

"Last year, 780 million ARM processors were shipped on the planet," Inglis said. In Japan, someone came up with a toilet with an integrated ARM-powered MP3 player, while someone else has designed a fireman's glove with a built-in ARM-based walkie-talkie.

A new ARM processor design, code-named Tiger, is expected to come out in silicon in 2006. It should raise handset speeds to 1GHz -- well past the speeds available today.

ARM doesn't make the chips -- it licenses the designs to Texas Instruments, Intel and other companies, which pay ARM licensing fees and royalties. Despite getting whacked by the chip industry downturn, ARM's revenue and profits are climbing again.

Recently, the company has begun to expand, Intel-like, and colonise components that connect to its processors. It has designed a signal processor that will help compress or decompress data such as video files: the first customer announcement will be made in a few weeks. In addition, ARM-designed graphics chips are set to appear in phones in about a year.