A STEADY SUCCESS STORY

The Acorn RISC chip was first used in the revolutionary, but not terribly successful, Acorn Archimedes desktop computer. The low-power 32-bit processors proved far more valuable to the booming mobile device market. Interest in the ARM family was growing as more designers became interested in RISC. ARM's design was seen to match a definite need for low power consumption, low-cost RISC processors.

Since the early-Nineties, the success story of the ARM has grown slowly but steadily. The ARM has now become the standard processor for mobiles and now 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor.

Today embedded systems are by far the largest market for processors: while a family may own one or two PCs, their car, mobile phones, and other devices may contain a total of dozens of embedded processors. ARM is the industry's leading provider of 32-bit embedded microprocessors, accounting for approximately 90 percent of all embedded 32-bit RISC processors.

ARM processors are used as the main CPU for most mobile phones, including those manufactured by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Apple, many personal digital assistants and handhelds, like the Apple iPod and Nintendo DS as well as many other applications, including GPS, digital cameras, digital televisions, network devices and storage.

Chip manufacturers use ARM designs in thousands of different ways, often embedding the ARM processor on a chip with lots of other components. In fact, today it is not uncommon for all the components of a computer to be on the one chip, this has an acronym, SOC, or System On a Chip. An example of an SOC is the new Apple iPad tablet computer. This one chip contains an ARM-processor, graphics controller and all the electronics they need to make up a complete system.

Business ecosystem around ARM

Around the time of the ARM-processor's 25th birthday in May 2010, more than 20 billion ARMs will have been manufactured. ARM Holdings, still headquartered in Cambridge, England, dominates the mobile phone chip market.

Unlike other microprocessor corporations, ARM only licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP), rather than manufacturing its own CPUs. Partners use ARM IP designs to create and manufacture system-on-chip designs, paying ARM a license fee for the original IP and a royalty on every chip or wafer produced. The value of the chip sales by ARM’ s many semiconductor licensees is expected to overtake the microprocessor sales of Intel, the world’s leading processor company.

ARM Holdings is best known for its processors, although it also designs, licenses and sells software development tools, system-on-a-chip infrastructure and software.

The principal visible outlet for Furber’s innovation has been the mobile phone handset although other uses of the high processing power and low energy consumption of the ARM processor include set top boxes, consumer and semi- professional still- and movie-cameras, digital televisions, gaming consoles and handheld gaming devices, fixed and wireless networking controllers, communications devices, hard disc drives, printers, Voice over IP devices, GPS, personal digital assistants, media players (including the iPod), as well as applications in automobiles and toys. All of these devices and applications benefit in one way or another from the unique engineering value of the ARM processor.