The Hindu : Business : An Artisan-strengthened ARM reaches out to India

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Nov 13, 2004

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Business

An Artisan-strengthened ARM reaches out to India

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, NOV. 12. If you use a mobile phone or a handheld computer, chances are you are holding at least three ARM chips in your palm.

Soon, these devices may have `desi' origins: The British company that designs the microprocessors to fuel eight out of ten portable devices will soon a full fledged design centre in India. ARM — it originally stood for Advanced RISC Machine — already has a foot in the door, thanks to its announced acquisition three months ago of the Sunnyvale, California, U.S.-based embedded systems designer, Artisan Components, which has a prior presence in India.

Design muscle

Once the acquisition is completed — expectedly by year end — ARM is poised to strengthen its design muscle here. "India is an important opportunity for ARM,'' says Robin Saxby, the company's Chairman and the man who is credited with creating this rare British presence in the global microchip business — and he was not just thinking of the company's direct business here; but rather of its rewarding partnerships with Indian players like Wipro and Tata Elxsi who have `fronted' its design efforts here since 1996, as well as the dozens of embedded systems outfits which build their applications to ride on top of ARM's industry standard silicon cores. "The Artisan acquisition will significantly change our presence in India.''

"Bangalore has one of the largest communities of engineers working on ARM any where in the world!,'' Sir Robin added here on Wednesday, talking to The Hindu, "I was astonished to find on my earlier visit that when asked to talk to engineers who worked on ARM architecture, I ended up speaking to over a thousand of them. I am told there are at least 1,800 software and hardware engineers who work on the ARM chip, in Bangalore alone.''

These numbers happen because ARM — which grew out of the British educational computer company Acorn in the early 1990s — created the most widely used 32-bit central processor architecture in the world and one of the lowest powered. These `digital engines' as ARM calls them, are licensed to most of the world's top chipmakers including Intel and Texas Instruments, who build their own applications around the ARM core.

ARM's plans

With the acquisition of Artisan — a producer of embedded memory, standard cell, input/output, analogue and mixed-signal components — ARM expects to have an even tighter lock-in on the Intellectual Property (IP) that goes into a chip and clearly a strong India-based design muscle won't come amiss.

What next for ARM? "We're converging on the consumer,'' says Sir Robin.

In the process, the company is pushing the embedded application business into a new 32 bit world; its new Cortex-M3 processor released last month is the Industry's first low cost 32 bit microcontroller — traditionally served by 8 and 16 bit solutions. Its flagship products like the ARM7 and ARM9 already, are fuelling a new generation of made-in-India hand-held computers such as the Simputer, enabling Indian designers to create lean, mean computing machines for a power-efficient world.

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