ARM expands Foundry Program for fabless chip companies

ARM Ltd. will add one of its most frequently licensed processor cores to its Foundry Program for fabless chip companies, so those companies can develop products using ARM cores without the upfront cost that other chip companies pay, ARM said Thursday at the Fabless Semiconductor Association Suppliers Expo in San Jose, California.

The Foundry Program allows companies lacking large, expensive semiconductor fabrication plants to design processors for mobile devices using ARM cores, said John Rayfield, vice president of marketing for the U.S. Participants in the program will now have access to the ARM926EJ core, which is designed for chips that will power devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants and digital cameras, he said.

Normally, ARM’s partners such as Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) pay large upfront fees to license core technology for however many products they choose, and however they see fit, Rayfield said. ARM then gets a royalty fee for each chip sold, he said.

In the Foundry Program, ARM sells a single-use manufacturing license for a processor core technology to foundries such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), United Microelectronics Co. (UMC), or IBM Corp. It then sells another single-use design license to the fabless design company to incorporate the ARM core in one of its products, which would then be built at the licensed foundry, Rayfield said.

The upfront cost of the single-use license is much lower than the full license, but ARM collects a higher royalty rate on each processor sold, Rayfield said.

The ARM926EJ core has been used in many processors since it was introduced in 2001, including chips from TI, Sony Corp., and STMicroelectronics NV. It is the first processor core to support Java that ARM has made available to the Foundry Program, Rayfield said.

ARM is also putting its PrimeXsys technology into the Foundry Program for the first time as of Thursday, Rayfield said. The PrimeXsys reference design allows companies to license designs for peripheral chip components such as a memory controller and an overall system controller for use with ARM cores, he said.