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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

February - 2008 - issue > Company Spotlight

ARM India, armed to face the future from India

Aritra Bhattacharya
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Aritra Bhattacharya
Last year in August, the entire ARM community, along with its partners had gathered in a university campus in Cambridge for the annual ARM Partner Meeting (APM). ARM, whose comprehensive product offering includes 16 and 32-bit RISC microprocessors, data engines, 3D processors, digital libraries, embedded memories, peripherals, software, and development tools et al was to share its technology roadmap with partners. A part of the initiative was a competition for the ‘Most Innovative Idea’. Over 120 ARM engineers from across the world had submitted their entries and guess what? The idea from India, centered on using an ARM processor to make an intelligent helmet was chosen as the winner.

The winner received a generous cash award. “But,” says Anil Gupta, Managing Director of ARM’s India Operations, “the recognition from the CEO, CTO, and the rest of the top management and the entire partner community was much more satisfying.”

The India development center
The award at the APM was not a one off occurrence. Such has been the performance of ARM India development center which is now trusted with ownership of many parts of the product development cycle.

ARM is organized into 5 business groups: processor, silicon library, media processing, system design, and support. All of these have a presence at the India development center, each at a different stage of evolution.

The library division at five years is the oldest. Its basic work is developing silicon libraries for SoCs. The processor division, started in early 2005 in ARM India, does some very critical work in the development of processor cores. Gupta notes that depending on the way the processor core interacts with the other subsystems like memory, the silicon library architecture can have a significant impact on the performance. In order to help realize optimum performance, power, or area, tweaking might be required either on the memory or the processor side, or both. The two divisions work closely to help realize this.

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