Why ARM Chips Power Nearly Every IoT Device

Look inside almost any modern connected device -- a smartphone, a smartwatch, a Wi-Fi thermostat, a battery-powered sensor node -- and you will find a processor core designed by ARM. It is one of the most successful engineering ideas in computing history. And here is the strange part: ARM has never manufactured a single one of those chips. It does not own a factory. It sells blueprints. A three-person project in Cambridge The story starts at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England, in the early 1980s. Acorn had built the BBC Micro, a hugely popular educational computer in the UK, and it needed a faster processor for its next machine. The commercial chips available at the time were disappointing, so a tiny team decided to design their own. The acronym everyone knows today originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine . Sophie Wilson designed the instruction set and wrote the simulator; Steve Furber led the physical chip design. RISC -- Reduced Instruction Set Computing -- was the key bet. Instead of piling on complex instructions, they kept the instruction set small and simple, which made the chip easier to build, cheaper, and remarkably power-efficient. The first silicon, the ARM1, was fabricated by VLSI Technology and delivered to Acorn on 26 April 1985. When the team powered it on, it simply worked -- first try. For anyone who has designed hardware, that is almost unheard of; new processors normally need several rounds of revisions to shake out design errors. A famous piece of Acorn lore is that the early ARM chips drew so little current they could keep running on leakage alone after the power was disconnected. From a British computer to the whole world Acorn the computer company faded, but the processor design did not. In 1990 the ARM team was spun out into a separate joint venture, and the acronym was quietly re-expanded to Advanced RISC Machines . The new company made a decision that defined its future: it would not build chips. It would license the designs and let oth