According to reports, ARM Technology China Co. Ltd., a controversial minority subsidiary of the semiconductor intellectual property licensor ARM Ltd. (Cambridge, UK), has begun to get involved in the field of autonomous driving.
According to reports, the company is at the center of a long-term quarrel with its parent company, SoftBank Group-backed ARM Ltd., which held a press conference on Thursday, August 26. An observer said that ARM China has been “completely rogue” and operates as an independent company. According to a report, the company now says it is not part of ARM. Another report stated that ARM China is part of ARM, but said it has created a sub-brand to manufacture multi-core computing units for autonomous vehicles. This will include artificial intelligence and visual processing cores. The sub-brand will be used for local and self-developed IP cores, and ARM China will be able to provide ARM IP and its own independent IP.
ARM was asked to comment and it provided the following statement: “As our global partners ship more than 25 billion Arm-based chips in 2020, Arm’s business is growing strongly. Of these 25 billion chips, more than 3 billion Shipped by our chip partners in China. Arm continues to establish a successful partnership with the Arm China team to support this growth. Since its establishment in 2018, the structure and ownership of the joint venture have remained unchanged. “
However, ARM has been fighting with its minority-owned subsidiary and is unable to remove CEO Allen Wu (Allen Wu) for more than a year. Wu held the company seal for ARM China and refused to hand it over. ARM has called on the Chinese authorities to try to help solve the problem, but apparently it was unsuccessful. The existence of the dispute also greatly reduced the chance of success for Nvidia’s proposal to acquire ARM for US$40 billion.
The launch of an independent IP core that does not return royalties to ARM will be the latest move in a series of events, which may effectively mark the robbery of ARM and take away its second largest market. ARM China is depicted in the photos at the press conference as consisting of ARM’s CPU cores and the so-called XPU cores, which will be developed in China, where the company has more than 400 employees. The IP modules in the XPU series will include a neural processing unit (NPU), a security processor (SPU), an image signal processor (ISP), and a visual processing unit (VPU).
