Intel Unveils ARM-based XScale Architecture

Electronic News, August 28, 2000 by Gale Morrison

Chalk up another top-tier licensing deal for ARM Ltd., as the original "star IP" company last week attended the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose to support Intel in its introduction of a microarchitecture called Xscale, the successor to the StrongARM architecture.

ARM said that XScale is ARM core-compliant and it therefore strengthens ARM's role as a good embedded-microprocessor option for handheld wireless Internet devices and Internet infrastructure applications. Such device applications were the genesis of ARM some 10 years ago, when the English development team, then known as Advanced RISC Machines, got to work on a very-low-power microprocessor for the eventually unsuccessful Apple Newton electronic tablet, which had been envisioned with wireless connectivity. What ARM has made of that first lack of success is semiconductor intellectual property (IP) history.

Intel, too, has made lemonade from what could have been just lemons. StrongARM, the XScale predecessor, and the all-important design engineers and know-how behind it, came to Intel via the 1997 acquisition of the semiconductor operations of Digital Equipment Corp (DEC). ARM and DEC had collaborated on StrongARM; DEC's intentions were to use it for LAN and WAN devices in the infrastructure, where StrongARM did in fact show up. (The acquisition by Intel ended litigation that DEC had filed against it.)

ARM and Intel now have an unrivaled set of technologies in the design, manufacture and marketing of embedded RISC processors, said Reynette Au, vice president of worldwide marketing for ARM. The two companies have combined their greatest strengths, she said.

Because the ARM integration in StrongARM goes back so far and because DEC and then Intel have put so much development work into it over the last five years, ARM presumably does not have the very lucrative royalty per IC arrangement in place that it otherwise might. The royalty arrangements could not, however, be confirmed by press time.

ARM did say that Intel is an architectural licensee. Intel has implemented the ARM instruction set architecture and ARM also participated in the design cycle by collaborating with Intel on the improvement of the "E" extensions included in the ARM v.5TE architecture. The "E" extensions, which are currently licensed and used by several ARM partners, provide enhanced DSP capability, which helps in Internet and mobile communications applications. As most people know, ARM is the de facto standard in wireless handset design.