Arm has formed a new 'solutions engineering' team to develop prototype chips for smartphones, laptops, and other consumer electronics and demonstrate what its technologies are capable of, reports Financial Times. There are concerns in the industry that Arm plans to either sell chips itself, or license such designs, competing with its licensees, but sources close to Arm have denied plans to sell or license the product and insist that it is only working on a prototype.
Traditionally, Arm licenses its instruction set architecture, logical designs of its CPUs or GPUs, silicon-proven physical designs of its CPUs or GPUs, and various other IP blocks to its clients. But this time around the chip being developed by the solutions engineering team, led by industry veteran Kevork Kechichian, is said to be more advanced than ever before, according to FT's source in the industry. The complexity of the project makes some people in the industry think that Arm may either build its own-brand SoCs, or at least license reference designs instead of licensing IP. Arm declined to comment on the information.
