Spectrum IEEE Online has published an article about IBM's move to license the PowerPC processor architecture under a model similar to that of Linux. The story explains how the licensing program will work, and why IBM hopes it will expand the range of applications supported by the PowerPC architecture.

IBM announced the program on March 31, at an event in New York City dubbed “Power Everywhere.”

According to the article, IBM's PowerPC licensing program will enable developers to customize the architecture for use in handheld devices, networking equipment, and more. Developers can add integrated device drivers and media processing layers almost without limitation, adapting the architecture for use in more different kinds of devices than IBM engineers alone could target. The only stipulation is that custom PowerPC chips must still support the PowerPC instruction set, and be able to run PowerPC applications, in order to prevent the architecture from becoming fragmented.

IBM will continue to market intellectual property, chip design, and foundry services around the PowerPC, and it hopes that wider penetration of the architecture into a range of embedded devices will ultimately increase its PowerPC-related business.

Additionally, the article says, IBM will permit other manufacturers to make PowerPC chips. Currently, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., in Singapore, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd., in Hsinshu are both equipped to do so.

The new licensing model contrasts with MIPS and ARM core licensing, according to the article, since it does not require up-front fees nor per-unit royalties based on chip production. In these regards, IBM's PowerPC licensing model most closely resembles the open source Linux software license, the article says.

LinuxDevices.com's annual survey for 2004 suggested that PowerPC is the third most popular embedded architecture, behind ARM and x86.

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