ARM acquires privately-held design firm

ARM acquires privately-held design firm
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
April 10, 2000 (11:27 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000410S0020

LONDON — ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) has acquire the assets of privately-held Infinite Designs Ltd. (Sheffield, England), a nine-person design services company with expertise in signal processing, wireless and multimedia applications, for about $600,000, according to ARM's first-quarter 2000 financial release.

"The acquisition of Infinite Designs will provide ARM with additional engineering resource, particularly in the key areas of SoC [system-on-chip] design and verification," said Warren East, vice president of operations for ARM, based here.

"ARM has experienced unparalleled success in recent years, making it the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC processor solutions," said Jonathan Morris, chief executive officer, Infinite Designs. "The Infinite team has a strong working relationship with ARM which includes past projects for the Amba [on-chip] bus and other supporting inte llectual property, and we are looking forward to contributing toward the continued success of the company."

In the first quarter, ARM's sales revenue was up 64 percent to about $34 million compared with about $21 million in the first quarter of 1999, and the company's profit before taxation jumped 157 percent to about $13 million. ARM also revised upward its estimate for unit shipments in the fourth quarter of 1999 by 10 percent to 72 million units, bringing its total shipments in 1999 to 182 million units, compared to 51 million units in 1998.