company industry semiconductors founded 27 november 1990 ; 25 years ago 1990 11 27 1 founders jamie urquhart mike muller tudor brown lee smith john biggs harry oldham dave howard pete harrod harry meekings al thomas andy merritt david seal 2 headquarters cambridge england united kingdom key people stuart chambers chairman simon segars ceo products microprocessor designs and graphics processing unit gpu designs revenue 968.3 million 2015 3 operating income 406.1 million 2015 3 net income 339.7 million 2015 3 total assets 3.21 billion 2016 4 owner softbank group number of employees circa 4 000 2016 5 website arm.com arm campus cambridge the arm i building at peterhouse technology park cambridge . the building is a work by architects barber casanovas ruffles 6 arm holdings plc arm is a multinational semiconductor and software design company owned by softbank group . headquartered in cambridge england its primary business is in the design of arm processors cpus although it also designs software development tools under the ds 5 realview and keil brands as well as systems and platforms system on a chip soc infrastructure and software . it is considered to be market dominant in the field of processors for mobile phones smartphones or otherwise and tablet computers . the company is one of the best known silicon fen companies . 7 processors based on designs licensed from arm or designed by licensees of one of the arm instruction set architectures are used in all classes of computing devices such as microcontrollers in embedded systems including real time safety systems cars abs 8 smart tvs google tv all modern smartwatches such as qualcomm toq as well as smartphones tablets laptops desktops 9 10 servers 11 and supercomputers hpc . 12 13 14 arm s mali line of graphics processing units gpu are used in laptops in over 50 % of android tablets by market share 15 and some versions of samsung s smartphones and smartwatches samsung galaxy gear . it is third most popular in mobile devices . 16 systems including iphone smartphones frequently include many chips from many different providers that include one or more licensed arm cores in addition to those in the main arm based processor . 17 arm s core designs are also used in chips that support many common network related technologies in smartphones bluetooth wifi and broadband 18 in addition to corresponding equipments such as bluetooth headsets 19 802.11 ac routers 20 and network provider s cellular lte . 21 arm s main cpu competitors include intel and amd for servers 22 and the former on mobile with its atom chips and the latter also sells arm based chips 23 in addition to competing with x86 based chips ; imagination technologies mips in embedded ; arm s main gpu competitors include mobile gpus from imagination technologies powervr qualcomm adreno and increasingly nvidia and intel . despite competing on gpus qualcomm and nvidia combine their gpus with an arm licensed cpu . arm had a primary listing on the london stock exchange and was a constituent of the ftse 100 index . it has a secondary listing on nasdaq . however japanese telecommunications company softbank group made an agreed offer for arm on 18 july 2016 subject to approval by arm s shareholders valuing the company at 23.4 billion . 24 the transaction was completed on 5 september 2016 . 25 26 contents 1 history 1.1 name 1.2 founding 1.3 acquisitions 1.3.1 1999 1.3.2 2000 1.3.3 2001 1.3.4 2003 1.3.5 2004 1.3.6 2005 1.3.7 2006 1.3.8 2011 1.3.9 2013 1.3.10 2014 1.3.11 2015 1.3.12 2016 1.4 change of ownership 2 operations 2.1 business model 2.2 facilities 3 technology 4 licensees 4.1 arm core licensees 4.2 arm architectural licensees 4.2.1 future of fujitsu that have made sparc supercomputers 4.3 mali licensees 5 sales and market share 6 partnerships 6.1 university of michigan 7 senior management 8 offer by softbank 9 see also 10 references 11 external links history edit name edit the acronym arm was first used in 1983 and originally stood for acorn risc machine . acorn computers first risc processor was used in the original acorn archimedes and was one of the first risc processors . however when the company was incorporated in 1990 the acronym was changed to advanced risc machines in light of the company s name advanced risc machines ltd. at the time of the ipo in 1998 the company name was changed to arm holdings 27 often just called arm like the processors . founding edit the company was founded in november 1990 as advanced risc machines ltd and structured as a joint venture between acorn computers apple computer now apple inc. and vlsi technology . 28 29 30 the new company intended to further the development of the acorn risc machine processor which was originally used in the acorn archimedes and had been selected by apple for their newton project . its first profitable year was 1993 . the company s silicon valley and tokyo offices were opened in 1994 . arm invested in palmchip corporation in 1997 to provide system on chip platforms and to enter into the disk drive market . 31 32 in 1998 the company changed its name from advanced risc machines ltd to arm ltd. 33 the company was first listed on the london stock exchange and nasdaq in 1998 34 and by february 1999 apple s shareholding had fallen to 14.8 % . 35 in 2010 arm joined with ibm texas instruments samsung st ericsson and freescale semiconductor now nxp semiconductors in forming a non profit open source engineering company linaro . 36 acquisitions edit 1999 edit micrologic solutions a software consulting company based in cambridge 37 2000 edit allant software a developer of debugging software 38 infinite designs a design company based in sheffield 39 euromips a smart card design house in sophia antipolis france 40 2001 edit the engineering team of noral micrologics a debug hardware and software company based in blackburn england 41 2003 edit adelante technologies of belgium creating its optimode data engines business a form of lightweight dsp engine 42 2004 edit axys design automation a developer of esl design tools 43 and artisan components a designer of physical ip standard cell libraries memory compilers phys etc. the building blocks of integrated circuits 44 2005 edit keil software a leading developer of software development tools for the microcontroller mcu market including 8051 and c16x platforms . 45 arm also acquired the engineering team of powerescape . 2006 edit falanx now called arm norway a developer of 3d graphics accelerators 46 and soisic who specialise in developing silicon on insulator physical ip 47 2011 edit obsidian software inc. a privately held company that creates processor verification products 48 prolific a developer of automated layout optimisation software tools and the prolific team will join the arm physical ip team 49 2013 edit internet of things startup sensinode 50 cadence s panta family of high resolution display processor and scaling coprocessor ip cores 51 2014 edit polarssl a software library implementing the ssl and tls protocols . 52 in february 2015 polarssl has been rebranded to mbed tls to better show its fit inside the mbed ecosystem . 53 duolog technologies an electronic design automation company that developed a suite of tools that automate the process of ip configuration and ip integration 54 2015 edit sansa security a provider of hardware security ip and software for advanced system on chip components deployed in internet of things iot and mobile devices 55 wicentric a bluetooth smart stack and profile provider 56 sunrise micro devices a provider of sub one volt bluetooth radio intellectual property ip . 56 offspark a provider of iot security software 57 carbon design systems a provider of cycle accurate virtual prototyping solutions 58 on 19 november arm alongside cisco systems dell intel microsoft and princeton university founded the openfog consortium to promote interests and development in fog computing . 59 2016 edit apical a provider of imaging and embedded computer vision ip products 60 change of ownership edit japanese telecommunications company softbank group made an agreed offer for arm on 18 july 2016 subject to approval by arm s shareholders valuing the company at 23.4 billion . 24 the transaction was completed on 5 september 2016 . 25 operations edit business model edit unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers such as intel freescale the former semiconductor division of motorola now nxp semiconductors and renesas a former joint venture between hitachi and mitsubishi electric 61 arm only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property ip rather than manufacturing and selling its own physical cpus gpus socs or microcontrollers . this model is similar to fellow british design houses arc international and imagination technologies who have similarly been designing and licensing gpus cpus and socs along with supplying tooling and various design and support services to their licensees . facilities edit the company has offices and design centres across the world including san jose california austin texas chandler arizona and olympia washington in the united states ; bangalore and noida in india ; trondheim in norway ; lund in sweden ; sophia antipolis in france ; munich in germany ; yokohama in japan ; china taiwan slovenia and hungary . 62 an arm processor in a hewlett packard psc 1315 printer . technology edit a characteristic feature of arm processors is their low electric power consumption which makes them particularly suitable for use in portable devices . 63 in fact almost all modern mobile phones and personal digital assistants contain arm cpus making them the most widely used 32 bit microprocessor family in the world . as of 2005 arms accounted for over 75 % of all 32 bit embedded cpus . 64 arm processors are used as the main cpu for most mobile phones including those manufactured by apple htc nokia sony ericsson and samsung ; 65 many pdas and handhelds like the apple ipod and ipad 66 67 game boy advance and nintendo ds game park gp32 and gamepark holdings gp2x ; as well as many other applications including gps navigation devices digital cameras digital televisions network devices and storage . 68 the wlan processor of sony s playstation portable is an older arm9 . 69 licensees edit arm offers several microprocessor core designs that have been publicly licensed 830 times including 117 times for their newer application processors non microcontroller used in such applications as smartphones and tablets . 70 six of those companies have a licence for their most powerful processor core the 64 bit cortex a57 some including arm s other 64 bit core the cortex a53 and four have a licence to their most powerful 32 bit core the cortex a15 . cores for 32 bit architectures include cortex a15 cortex a12 cortex a17 cortex a9 cortex a8 cortex a7 and cortex a5 and older classic arm processors as well as variant architectures for microcontrollers that include these cores arm cortex r7 arm cortex r5 arm cortex r4 arm cortex m4 arm cortex m3 arm cortex m1 arm cortex m0 and arm cortex m0 for licensing ; the three most popular licensing models are the perpetual implementation license term license and per use license . 71 companies often license these designs from arm to manufacture and integrate into their own system on chip soc with other components such as gpus sometimes arm s mali or radio basebands for mobile phones . in addition to licenses for their core designs arm offers an architectural license for their instruction sets allowing the licensees to design their own cores that implement one of those instruction sets . an arm architectural license is more costly than a regular arm core license 72 and also requires the necessary engineering power to design a cpu based on the instruction set . processors believed to be designed independently from arm include apple s architecture license from march 2008 73 a6 a6x and a7