Chips with everything

In March 1972, Sir Robin Saxby gave a talk to the Royal Television Society called 'TV and Chips' about a 'state of the art' integrated circuit, containing 50 resistors and 50 transistors. Today's 'state of the art' chips contain up to a billion transistors. This enormous leap forward illustrates how dramatically the semiconductor industry has evolved in the past 34 years. The next 10 years are predicted to bring times of turbulent change for the industry, as more and more digital devices are used around the world. In this talk, Sir Robin will discuss the history of the Microchip Industry in parallel with ARM's history, demonstrating how a small European start-up can become a world player in the IT sector. He will also present his vision of important applications and developments in the next 20 years that are likely to become even more pervasive than the mobile phone is today, and will provide anecdotes and learning points from his own experience at ARM. About ARM: Sir Robin and a group of designers from Acorn created ARM in 1990. The ARM architecture has become the most popular chip architecture on the planet, with ARM's partners shipping 1.7 billion ARM Powered chips in 2005. These chips are used in many of the devices which have transformed the world we live in, such as mobile phones, digital cameras, set top boxes and games consoles. ARM's customers include Sony, Apple, Nokia, Sharp, Intel, Texas Instruments and Samsung. ARM's business model was to turn its enemies into friends by licensing them to use ARM technology and partnering with them. ARM does not manufacture chips but instead licenses its technology to its global partners obtaining license fees and royalties. Sixty per cent of ARM's employees work in research and development and ARM's annual R&D budget runs at between 25 and 30 per cent of sales.