Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Back in 2004, when Arm had revenues of under $150 million, it was seen by many as a very bold step to pay $900 million for the third party physical IP supplier Artisan when most IDMs developed their own physical IP.
“We understand architecture, they understand process,” Sir Robin Saxby, chairman of Arm, told EW at that time of the takeover, adding “tying that together gives us new domains which broaden our customer base. Looking into the future, foundries will provide more and more of the wafers and,hopefully, we can get the IDMs to use the Artisan library. Nowadays the libraries are getting more and more important.”
The following year Arm’s CEO, Warren East, told EW: “The third physical IP market is very immature. artisan are the leaders and most of their customers are fabless design Companies, so most of Artisan’s business comes from foundries making chips for fabless companies while Arm derives most of its revenues from silicon IDMs and silicon IDMs tend not to use third party physical IP. Our aim is that over the two to three years is to get the foundries to use Arm physical IP.”
And that is exactly what Arm did.
It did turn out to be a smart move. As a user of Artisan standard cell libraries and memory compilers at the time I remember thinking it was a dumb move, largely on the basis of thinking that these things were low value IP. They are really, but few semiconductor companies differentiate themselves on having a better NAND gate, so why not buy it in? Before you know it you’re selling NAND gates to everyone and upselling to other things. Of course, nuts and bolts physical IP has got a lot more complicated as well.
Thanks DontAgree, I’ve completed it.
Looks like the story ends mid sentence …