CNET has posted an article discussing ARM's business model, licensing practices, and near-monopoly share of some embedded processor markets. Despite its size and power, the company is not perceived as a monopoly, according to the article, because of its cooperative business practices and English origins.

According to author Michael Kanellos, a recent deal with Sony Ericsson brings ARM's share of the wireless handset market to 80 percent. Meanwhile, the company's chip designs are found in 40 percent of digital cameras. Last year, 780 million processors based on the ARM architecture were shipped globally, the article says. ARM has emerged as the most popular platform for new embedded project designs in LinuxDevices.com's annual reader survey, which showed ARM overtaking x86 for the first time in 2004.

Companies like Intel and Microsoft with similar market shares are often perceived as bullying monopolists. ARM has avoided such image problems, Kanellos suggests, because as a fabless semiconductor design house, it works closely with a number of other companies, most of which are larger. Chips based on ARM's embedded processor designs, architectures, instruction sets, and other intellectual property include Intel XScale, Texas Instruments OMAP, Freescale DragonBall, NEC MPCore, and many others; see the ARM section of our Embedded Processor and SoC Quick Reference Guide for more details.

Other factors leading to ARM's benign image, according to Kanellos, include its relatively small size and the general perception that English companies rarely become IT market powerhouses.

Despite its benign image, ARM is integrating an increasing number of peripherals into its system-on-chip designs, and working to produce increasingly complete chipsets for vertical market applications — much like Intel and other large chip houses, the article says.

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