Passing the Torch: Reflections on ARC’s Journey and the Future of Specialized Processing

By Rick Clucas, SVP, Innovation & Technology, V-Nova
EE Times | February 10, 2026

Having been a co-founder and CTO of ARC Cores, spun out from Argonaut Software where I was the first employee, the recent announcement that MIPS is acquiring ARC from Synopsys put me in a reflective mood. ARC was my first tech baby, and my biological babies are growing up too, which has a way of sharpening your perspective.

When we built ARC, our goal was to give chip designers a flexible architecture. Our vision was to let them optimize certain functions best suited to hardware while running others better suited to software on a closely coupled RISC core, ensuring the most efficient overall flow of data. This blend, along with smart memory interfaces that could be connected directly to processor registers, allowed ARC-based systems to achieve very high throughput with minimal silicon area and therefore power consumption and cost. In many ways, ARC was an early example of what we now call customer-defined application-specific processor (ASP) architectures [1].

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