Ten of the licences signed were for ARM’s Cortex-A series processors. Six of these licences were for Cortex-A series processors based on ARMv8-A including two licences for the future processor technology. Cortex-A series processors are deployed into a wide range of end markets, and in Q3 ARM signed licences with customers planning to build chips for smart mobile devices, digital TVs, servers and remotely operated vehicles.

ARM also signed six licences for its Mali multimedia processors, mainly for use in mobile, consumer electronics and automotive infotainment. Five of these licences were for Mali graphics processors, including one for “Mimir” ARM’s next generation graphics processor, and one licence was for Mali display technology.

Nineteen of the licences were for Cortex-M series processors for use in technologies required for the Internet of Things; microcontrollers, smart meters, sensors, security and low-power wireless communication chips.

Over recent years, ARM has seen increasing interest from OEMs wanting to take more control over the chips going into their products, including licensing ARM technology. In Q3, three major OEMsd ARM technology for their future products.

Q3 2015 and Cumulative Processor Licensing Analysis

* Includes ARM7, ARM9, ARM10 and ARM11

** Includes CPU and Mali subscription licences

† Includes all extant licences that are expected to generate royalties

Physical IP licensing

During the quarter ARM saw continuing demand for physical IP optimised for use with processors (POP IP). POP IP enables a licensee to more readily achieve high-performance, low-power processor implementations through specially optimised physical IP technology. For every chip implemented using POP IP, ARM receives a royalty both for the processor in the chip and for the physical IP. This quarter ARM signed a licence for POP IP that will optimise ARM’s next generation “Artemis” processor on a 10nm FinFET manufacturing process.

Technology Design Wins and Ecosystem Development

In recent months many leading technology companies have announced developments in their ARM-based product lines, including:

· The BBC revealed the micro:bit, a pocket sized computer, based on ARM Cortex-M0, that will be incorporated into school lessons for all Year 7 students across the UK.

· Renesas introduced the Synergy family of ARM-based microcontrollers which are designed to make it easier to create Internet of Things devices.

· STMicro announced that it had licensed the new 32-bit ARMv8-R processor technology for chips targeting real-time safety-related smart driving applications and in industrial applications.

· The enterprise software company SUSE® announced a partner program expansion, which makes available a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 for partners to develop, test and deliver products using ARM server chips.

· Atmel started shipping Atmel SMART™ microcontrollers, based on the Cortex-M7 processor. These allow customers to scale-up performance while maximising software reuse.

· IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce.com each issued separate announcements regarding their cloud-based analytics platforms and support for ARM’s mbed platform.

· Qualcomm unveiled several new additions to its ARM-based range of processors for mobile devices, with a mix of quad-core, hexa-core and octa-core designs.

· Qualcomm also demonstrated a pre-production ARM-based server chip, running Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL database and KVM hypervisor. The chip will be suitable for cloud workloads including big-data mining, machine learning, and Infrastructure as a Service offerings.

More partner announcements can be found on the ARM website at  www.arm.com/news.

Technology Royalties

Q3 royalty revenue was generated from the shipment of 3.6 billion ARM processor-based chips, up 20% year-on-year.

Growth in the number of ARM-based chips shipped into embedded applications continued, up 30% year-on-year, with particularly strong growth in ARM-based microcontrollers and smartcards. In addition, ARM received the first royalty revenue from a major supplier to the base station equipment market as they started to ship their first ARM-based chips.

Q3 2015 Processor Unit Shipment Analysis