ARM Holdings Plc has licensed its ARM7TDMI processor core and design tools to Fujitsu Ltd. The Japanese company will integrate the core into its 0.25-micron ASIC library for applications including hard-disk drives, digital cameras, digital set top boxes, cellular phones and hand-held devices. Fujitsu has also licensed Arm’s Micropack microcontroller design tool.
John Cornish, Arm’s European marketing manager, refused to disclose the value of the deal but said that Arm’s licensing agreements were typically in the multi-million dollar range. The majority of Arm’s revenues come from licensing deals and the sale of associated tools. Cornish noted that a lot of Arm’s new licensing agreements are made with existing customers. Cornish said that the need to keep licensing revenues buoyant accounted for ARM’s aggressive roadmap — the Cambridge, UK-based firm has laid out its design plans for processors up to the ARM10 core. The ARM10 design was introduced at last year’s Microprocessor Forum and prototypes are due to surface in the middle of this year.
ARM-designed chips are now the second-best sellers in the embedded chip market, with 50 million units sold last year, according to Cornish. Motorola IncÆs Coldfire 68K design – which Cornish described as legacy architecture – is the market leader. MIPS Technologies Inc and ARM are roughly equivalent in terms of chip sales. However, ARM is not going down the 64-bit design path at the moment, despite MIPSÆ move to 64-bit with its ‘Ruby’ technology, which has been licensed by NEC Corp and others. Cornish claimed that there was no customer pressure or desire for 64-bit designs. He cited the demands on memory and power consumption as the reason why firms were not desperate for new 64-bit technology. as 64-bit designs require, more memory space to hold the same number of instructions, according to Cornish. By contrast, 32-bit designs typically require only a 4Gb instruction space and have a rich instruction set and good integer and floating point performance, Cornish said.
