ARM’s latest triumph: chip to stop your car crashing
ARM Holdings has announced a bid to break into the driverless car industry – its first innovation since a £24bn takeover by the Japanese.
The Cambridge-based chip designer, the jewel in Britain’s technology crown before being sold last month, has designed a chip that can help driverless cars make quick decisions when faced with obstacles on the road.
It marks a change for ARM, which previously focused on designing chips for mobile handsets, with its technology found in 95pc of all smartphones.
The new chip, the Cortex-R-52, will help cars make decisions such as accelerating, steering or emergency braking, and will also be used in robots.
ARM is ploughing more money into the driverless car industry and expects the first cars with its chip to hit the market in 2020.
The driverless car industry is expected to be worth £11.6bn by the end of the decade. This week Barack Obama threw his weight behind the technology, with his administration publishing guidelines for the industry.
But while ARM’s latest design is a boost to UK innovation, it is also a sign of what British shareholders are missing out on after the firm was bought by SoftBank. British investors will no longer benefit from ARM’s innovation, and there are concerns over where the patents from any future inventions will be stored.
SoftBank is owned by Japan’s second richest man, Masayoshi Son, who is founder and chief executive of the firm. The ARM deal marked the biggest Asian acquisition of a UK firm, and sparked fears jobs, knowledge and expertise would be moved from Britain – despite promises to the contrary from SoftBank.
ARM delisted from the London stock market at the beginning of September, and the FTSE 100 lost its leading tech star.
However, Ian Smythe, director of marketing programmes at ARM, said it was an indication the company was still designing the ‘best products around’.
And it will provide a boost to Cambridge, where ARM employs about 1,200. ‘ARM has got to where it is today by following a business model which is very successful,’ said Smythe.