Arm China will be dedicated to developing products exclusively for the China market, and plans for an IPO on the local stock exchange, according to Rene Haas, president of Arm's IP products group.

Headquartered in Shenzhen, Arm China is 49% owned by ARM and 51% owned by a fund with China-based investors. Arm China was formed according to a MoU signed between the parties in May 2017, and started operations in April 2018.

Arm China is Arm's sole platform to license its technology locally in China, said Haas, adding that China's local chipmakers are able to license Arm's technology directly through the JV to develop in-house their chip solutions for IoT and other applications exclusively for the China market.

Arm China will not be responsible for licensing Arm's technology for use in products that will be sold in markets other than China, Haas indicated. Arm China will be also developing chip technologies exclusively for its China-based clients focusing on the domestic market, Haas said.

In addition, Arm China plans to go public on one of China's stock exchanges, Haas noted. Details of the plan will be available when a schedule is set.

Commenting on reports about Qualcomm's planned exit from the server chip business, Haas indicated Arm is optimistic about the server market. Arm's goal of reaching a 25% share of the server chip market remains unchanged, Haas said.

The availability of 5G will be driving demand for network servers, as well as other high-end computing devices such as routers and base stations, Haas noted. Arm is already working with its ecosystem partners in the server chip market.

Chipmakers Cavium and Ampere Computing have both introduced their Arm chips, while Microsoft has announced its support for Arm server processors. Besides, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now fully supported on Arm server-optimized SoCs.

Arm has also stepped up efforts to expand its presence in the artificial intelligence (AI) field involving infrastructure, embedded and IoT device applications, according to Haas. The company has poured significant resources into the development of CPU and GPU architectures to support diverse AI applications. For machine learning, Arm has introduced its Project Trillium, an IP suite consisting of highly-scalable processors to deliver enhanced ML and neural network functionality. In the era of AI, terminal devices will be developed to require superior performance to process large amounts of data and recognize patterns in the data, Haas identified.

In the automotive electronics field, Arm is working with chip vendors including Renesas and NXP to jointly cope with ever-growing demand for products from ultrasonic parking sensors to server-class compute platforms that enable autonomous vehicles, Haas said. Arm already holds as high as 90% of the automotive ADAS market, Haas said.

Haas also claimed Arm's complete ecosystem involving over 1,000 companies engaged in the software development and hardware manufacture will allow the company's processor architectures to remain competitive against its counterparts including RISC-V.

RISC-V is an open, free ISA enabling a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration, according to the RISC-V Foundation website. RISC-V has developed an ecosystem of more than 60 companies including Google, HPE, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, Microsemi and others.

By: DocMemory
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