Intel, the world’s biggest semiconductor maker is reportedly planning to manufacture ARM based smartphone chips. The company has entered into a new licensing agreement with competitor ARM to produce ARM-based chips in Intel factories.
The deal was announced at the Intel Developer Forum recently and will let Intel offer third-party semiconductor companies its most advanced 10-nanometer production lines for manufacturing the complex chips usually used in smartphones.
Intel, which gets the majority of its revenue from making personal-computer processors, has missed the boat to larger and faster-growing phone market. Now Intel is trying to persuade other chipmakers to use its factories for their production.
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This deal is expected to give Intel a much-needed boost in the mobile space and also gives the company leverage the potential of VR hardware. Adding licenses for ARM’s technology could open up that business to fabricating chips based on those designs for companies such as Qualcomm Inc. and Apple Inc., which now have their chips produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and others.
As part of the collaboration, ARM and Intel Custom Foundry will accelerate the development and implementation of ARM SoCs on Intel’s 10-nanometer process. Specifically, Artisan Physical IP, ARM’s intellectual property, will be made available in the process.
“Optimizing this technology for Intel’s 10 nm process means that foundry customers can take advantage of the IP to achieve best-in-class PPA (power, performance, area) for power-efficient, high-performance implementations of their designs for mobile, IoT and other consumer applications,” Zane Ball, co-general manager of Intel Custom Foundry at Intel, wrote in a blog post.
Ball added that Intel has partnered with ANSYS, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys previously. Intel also is making chips for customers such as Netronome and LG Electronics, which recently announced a new flagship device that will be the first handset to ship with Android 7.0.