History
The Company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology. Its first profitable year was 1993. The Company's Silicon Valley and Tokyo offices were opened in 1994. In 1997, ARM Holdings invested in Palmchip Corporation to provide a system on chip platforms and to enter into the disk drive market. In 1998 the Company changed its name from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd to ARM Ltd. The Company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998. Apple's shareholding had fallen to 14.8% by February 1999.
In 1999, ARM acquired Micrologic Solutions, a software consulting company based in Cambridge. Further expansion followed in 2000 when ARM acquired Allant Software, a developer of debugging software; Infinite Designs, a design company based in Sheffield and EuroMIPS a smart card design house in Sophia Antipolis, France. In 2001, ARM acquired the engineering team of Noral Micrologics, a debug hardware and software company based in Blackburn, UK. The Company's China office was opened in 2002. In 2003, ARM acquired Adelante Technologies of Belgium, creating its OptimoDE data engines business, a form of lightweight DSP engine.
In 2004, ARM acquired Axys Design Automation, a developer of ESL design tools; and Artisan Components, a designer of Physical IP (standard cell libraries, Memory Compilers, PHYs etc.), the building blocks of integrated circuits. Further acquisitions followed in 2005 when ARM acquired KEIL Software, a leading developer of software development tools for the microcontroller market, including 8051 and C16x platforms. ARM also acquired the engineering team of PowerEscape. In 2006, ARM acquired Falanx (now called ARM Norway), a developer of 3D graphics accelerators, and SOISIC, who specialise in developing silicon-on-insulator physical IP. In 2010, ARM joined with IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Freescale Semiconductor in forming a Not For Profit Open Source engineering company, Linaro. In 2011, ARM bought Obsidian Software Inc., a privately held company that creates processor verification products. In November 2011, ARM acquired Prolific, a developer of automated layout optimisation software tools, and the Prolific team will join the ARM physical IP team.
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