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At the moment it is not being disclosed why it is doing so. It could be to demonstrate capabilities to its IP licensees, or it could be setting up to compete with its customers by adopting the fabless semiconductor business model, or it could simply be exploring a route to boosting its potential revenue base before its IPO later this year.
Arm is reported to have formed a “solutions engineering” group headed by NXP and Qualcomm veteran Kevork Kechichian to build the chip.
The cost of such an initiative suggests that Arm is looking to make money from the chip rather than use it simply as a demonstrator.
For Arm to compete with its customers by selling chips would kill its traditional fair-to-all licensing business model.
Recently it was suggested that Arm may change its business model to charge OEMs making end-user products a licence free as well as charging chip companies.
Arm’s owner, SoftBank, has debts of around $170 billion and is particularly keen to raise as much as possible from the IPO.
Ah Yes DB there’s Arm the chip and Arm the company and you are correct about Arm1 the chip being fabbed at VLSI in 1985 when Arm stood for Acorn RISC Machine. Arm the IP company was founded in 1990 when Arm stood for Advanced RISC Machines. With capital of only £1.75m it could not afford to spin a chip which is why Robin Saxby devised the IP model.
Another current news article masquerading as a ‘Memory Lane’ post. Didn’t ARM start off by building chips with a fabless model?
Not as far as I know, DB
Wasn’t the ARM1 designed by the team, still at Acorn (or a variant of Acorn), and then sent to VLSI to be fabbed? It wasn’t until a bit later that ARM was spun out and went to the IP model. Or am I remembering incorrectly, or only have a portion of the story)?
The original ARM chips were indeed fabricated by VLSI for Acorn Computers for use in their own RISC based products. Acorn Computers ran into financial trouble due to the glut in the home computing market at that time and was eventually closed in around 2010 though dates vary depending on what source you read. A lot of the Acorn employees moved to the new IP based company. Of the original ARM1 design team, I believe that Sophie Wilson now works as the Director of IC Design at Broadcom, Cambridge, and Steve Furber has moved to acedemia working in the field of advanced neural networking technology.
As a footnote, I was involved with Acorn Computers in the latter days in the design of their first RISC PC. We provided the ASIC chip that made a 486 class CPU believe it was in a PC environment whilst the ARM CPU provided emulation of some of the most popular PC peripherals in conjunction with Cambridge based Aleph 1 who did the emulation software. Happy days, great teams all around and warmly remembered.