Where are Texas Instruments, Nokia in ARM's AXI deal?

Where are Texas Instruments, Nokia in ARM's AXI deal?
By Peter Clarke, Semiconductor Business News
June 16, 2003 (8:37 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030616S0050

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Processor intellectual property licensor ARM Holdings plc, disclosed 27 companies as collaborators in its AMBA Extended Interface (AXI) technology, which is meant to soup-up ARM's AMBA bus and make it suitable for high-performance communications on future system-on-chip (SOC) designs (see June 16 story).

The list of names includes many top ten semiconductor makers, all the leading EDA companies, an Ericsson company and Qualcomm from the mobile communications arena.

However, conspicuous by their absence from the list are two companies that have historically been two of ARM's biggest partners.The two names are: leading DSP and mobile phone SOC vendor Texas Instruments Inc. and Nokia, the world's leading mobile phone maker.

Could these absences potentially signal a split in the normally tightly-knit and harmonious world of ARM. Does this sig nify a falling out among the triumvirate involved in the OMAP platform? OMAP is Texas Instruments SOC architecture for mobile communications and it, or its successors, might seem to be a natural candidate to take benefit from the a high-performance on-chip interconnect standard.

"We can't talk about all the collaborators," said John Rayfield, vice president of marketing in the U.S. for ARM. "There's some companies who wouldn't want their names mentioned."

And it is noticeable that Texas Instruments and Nokia are members of the Open Core Protocol consortium (see www.ocpip.org), a grouping in which ARM is conspicuous by its own absence and which many of its own prestigious AXI collaborators have not joined.

"TI and Nokia use a mix of design approaches including OCP," said Rayfield.

"We approached most of the [ARM] partners and they all contributed [to AXI]. This is about finding a solution for the industry. OCP is another solution to the problem ," said Rayfield.