Arm Looks to World Domination
Interview contributed by Nick Flaherty
Chip manufacturer Arm has seen tremendous growth over the last year and is optimistic this will continue during 1999. It believes the advent of third generation mobile will, in particular, bring significant opportunities.
CeBIT News: Since flotation, Arm has seen tremendous up from 574p to 1928p growth in its first year as a public company. What do you think is behind this?
Saxby: We had explosive growth in unit shipments in the last calendar year, more than 50 million pieces of Arm silicon shipped in 1998, which means we are close to being number one in units, or first equal. 500% growth in unit terms is not bad. A major part of that growth was in the mobile area. We will be shipping to 55 countries in the first half of 1999. We are now in 11 locations. But the main thing is to avoid arrogance.
CeBIT News: What are going to be the strongest future applications?
Saxby: I think there are significant opportunities in third generation and areas such as Bluetooth. We believe that's going to be very significant and a great opportunity for the Arm7TDMI in a single chip radio, particularly when you get the combination of basestations, where there are pico cellular GSM exchanges instead of DECT digital cordless basestations. Then there's automotive, first into ABS braking systems, then into engine management, airbag control and information systems. There's also smartcards, where we have four partners, including OKI, as well as mass storage designs, networking such as Ethernet, xDSL with Alcatel, Virata. Design wins in the US to date include Thomson/RCA and General Instruments, through our partner VLSI Technology.
CeBIT News: Toshiba, a leading supporter of the MIPS architecture, has recently taken an Arm license. That must be pleasing to put one over on a competitor?
Saxby: Most of the MIPS licensees have become Arm licensees and many of the Arm licensees are MIPS licensees. I'm pleased, but in the same way I was pleased about Seiko, Epson or Matsushita. My vision is to get the whole world using Arm. I think one of the things that this shows is that the intellectual property business model has proved it has worked if you have an architecture, and that helps both of us. The other thing that's important is that the end customers can choose chips from one of a number of Arm licensees and they like that choice.
CeBIT News: Now that MIPS Technologies has gone out on its own in the market with its architecture and a new strategy, what do you think is the challenge going forward for them?
Saxby: For MIPS, I think their challenge is going to be the architectural development licenses. We were very tight about policing our architecture and that's our strongest advantage. The big issue is the control of the IP, and what we will not do is water down the processing model and undercut our partners.
CeBIT News: How do you see the recent deal between MIPS and one of the founding Arm licensees, Texas Instruments (TI), to take the MIPS 32bit Jade and 64bit Opal processor cores?
Saxby: The relationship with TI is excellent and still developing. Again, MIPS have been very successful in games and they have a 64Bit core which we have chosen not to do. We decided to concentrate on the 16 and 32Bit, and realistically we rarely see them as competition. It's more often converting the 68000 and Z80 users to Arm. That's the reality, the real issue. I think the semiconductor companies will license lots of things from lots of people. It's a 'make or buy' decision. That's not to say we don't have the high performance parts, as we continue to work with Intel on StrongArm, and we are working on StrongArm 2 and 3.
CeBIT News: There hasn't really been a sign of the Piccolo DSP co-processor that was developed a couple of years ago. What happened there?
Saxby: We learnt a lot from Piccolo, and as a result we are now adding nine extensions including DSP extensions with the Arm9E. It turned out that customers didn't want it, but if you don't have things like Piccolo, we wouldn't be pushing the edge of the technology. We're not religious about our own designs. Its what the customer wants that counts.
CeBIT News: What are your barriers to growth in the future?
Saxby: Our problem is that we do not have enough engineering resources. We have had to cut consulting revenues as a percentage because there's other things we could do with the designers, and from the results you can see there' s been more money spent on research and development. That's because licensing makes more money than consulting. We are spending 28% on R&D so far, and that's higher than we planned.
CeBIT News: Is that why you teamed up with design tool vendor Cadence Design Systems as a licensee offering Arm cores to customers of its design consultancy?
Saxby: The main reason we picked Cadence was because they were local. The Alba centre [in Scotland] facilitated the relationship. We are looking for companies that have certain qualities because we are putting our name behind it, such as automotive. The key there is the design flow, so we are planning a huge growth in training. We can use our engineers to train their engineers.
Find more 'arm' on cebitnews.com
Cable Modems Move Forward
by Philip Gallagher
Conexant's chip turns cable modems into home broadband hubs.
Conexant Systems, formerly Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, has unveiled a low-cost, single-chip cable modem that is capable of being upgraded via software.
According to Alfred D'Augustine, VP of Conexant's digital infotainment division, the development of the new chip has accomplished two key goals. "First, we have dramatically cut costs (by as much as 25%) by squeezing most of the capabilities of an entire cable modem circuit board onto a single chip. Second, we have provided manufacturers with the critical ability to software-upgrade their products so they can support the US DOCSIS 1.1 standard for cable modems or make mid-course feature corrections or additions."
The company says that the chip's physical layer is compliant with both US and European standards and the programmable MAC is implemented in software via an on-chip ARM microprocessor. This later feature,
|
