ARM Extends Its Long-Term Investment In India With A Dedicated VLSI Test Lab

Second VLSI test lab to address critical design requirement for silicon validation of IP flow

CAMBRIDGE, UK – May 8, 2008 – ARM today announced that it has incorporated a VLSI test lab in its design center in Bangalore. The new VLSI test lab will provide analysis of VLSI libraries and ARM® physical IP to correlate design to silicon behavior. This activity has increasingly become a Partner requirement prior to SoC tapeout as technologies have increased in complexity and mask costs have escalated.

ARM has had a long term investment in India, and the establishment of the VLSI test lab completes the requirements to enable the ARM India design center to provide a full complement of design services to the company’s global Partners. The addition expands capacity and accelerates development for ARM Partners. Test chips developed by ARM will go through final validation at the new VLSI test lab. This will enable ARM Partners utilizing production-ready IP libraries to significantly reduce their time-to-market cycle and increase the probability of first-pass success of their SoCs.

“The choice of India as the location of the second VLSI test lab for ARM is yet another example of India’s significance in our global operations. Combining expertise in IP and test chip design and test engineers in the same geographic location will reduce overall silicon validation cycle time, enabling us to turn around silicon data to Partners quickly, resulting in an accelerated release schedule for products designed with ARM physical IP,” said Warren East, CEO, ARM.

The new VLSI test lab will focus on silicon validation of ARM physical IP (memory compilers, standard cells, power management kits, general purpose I/Os and specialty I/Os) designed at cutting-edge technologies that include 65nm and 45nm processes across all leading foundries.

“Bangalore is a world-class design center catering to physical IP development within ARM and India provides the skilled VLSI testing talent required for such a lab,” said Anil Gupta, managing director – India Operations, ARM Embedded Technologies Pvt. Ltd., India. “The new test lab offers a tremendous learning opportunity and a very attractive proposition to aspiring engineers.”

About ARM
ARM designs the technology that lies at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. ARM’s comprehensive product offering includes 32-bit RISC microprocessors, graphics processors, enabling software, cell libraries, embedded memories, high-speed connectivity products, peripherals and development tools. Combined with comprehensive design services, training, support and maintenance, and the company’s broad Partner community, they provide a total system solution that offers a fast, reliable path to market for leading electronics companies. More information on ARM is available at http://www.arm.com.