ARM celebrates 20 years

BLIGHTY chip designer ARM has celebrated its 20th anniversary with the opening of a new building and announcement of a £2.5 million charitable bond to help Cambridge entrepreneurs.

ARM's new 30,000 square foot building, ARM6, is at the Fulbourn Road headquarters and will accommodate the company's expanding Cambridge workforce.

Having established itself as the dominant low-power CPU designer, ARM is now having a look at low-power graphics. The new building at its Cambridge campus will house its multimedia processing team.

There are more than 20 billion ARM-based processors in the world and a huge number are inside mobile phones.

All this expansion is a far cry from the days when ARM, which stands for Advanced RISC Machines, was spun out of Acorn two decades ago. Then it had a handful of software engineers who could barely afford to pay themselves.

Meanwhile the outfit has been shelling out cash to assist start-ups. Cambridge-based social enterprise, Future Business, will be using the £2.5 million charitable bond to help pay for a £6.5 million incubation centre for social and environmental businesses to be built off King's Hedges Road in Cambridge.

ARM's bond is added to £2.5 million already pledged by TTP, the technology consultancy at Melbourn. µ