HomeThe Bluewater BlogARM's Next Frontier

Two of us are attending an ARM meeting in Hong Kong this week. There is a quite a large turn-out of companies across Asia including Singapore, Taiwan, China, Korea, and of course New Zealand. What struck me as I looked at the group about to go out for dinner last night, was that there were more people there among ARM's tools distributors in just a single region, than worked for ARM in total when I joined just 14 years ago. ARM shipments passed the 10 billion mark last year and the current run rate is over 3 billion per annum. Of interest particularly is the massive growth in low-end ARM micros. The Cortex-M3 is 'only' shipping about a quarter of a billion units per annum, but volume is more than doubling each year. When the $1 micro was announced I wrote a short paper about the possible impact (available here). It seems that ARM is well on the way to making good on some of the benefits identified, particularly in terms of quality of tools, and the productivity of engineers developing with low-end microcontroller technology.