The $900 million ARM Holdings today controls almost 90% of the microprocessor market for smartphones. The British company founded in 1990, which had technology giant Apple as one of the founding partners, has been growing rapidly over the past couple of years. On a recent visit to Bangalore, Graham Budd, the chief operating officer, at ARM tells Anand J on where the technology in the smartphones is headed as well as the company?s plans for expansion into other devices.

In the fast evolving smartphone market what?s next in mobile technology?

Mobile handsets? switch to smartphones is complete now. Last year, the mobile market was flat while the smartphone market increased by 45%. I am expecting smartphones to record a 30-40% growth this year. Smart connected computing

devices, tablets are the key technology going forward. After 20 years of PCs, we are seeing a post PC era, where mobile devices are driving the future of computing. What we are seeing in smartphones is the need for additional performance driving the likely applications, better user interfaces, more graphical capabilities, augmented reality and security applications.

So one important technology we have developed over all these years in the mobile space is big. LITTLE technology. The application processors were single core, now most of them are dual or quad core processors. big. LITTLE is an

approach to reduce your power consumption by using the both a big core and a little core, the operating system can seamlessly switch between that depending on the workload, but one at a time.

For instance if you are making a call, or a small application, that will be working on a small processor using very low power. When you need to do something more complex like downloading high quality media, then the big core starts running, just when it needs to run. There have been lot of innovation around this over the last couple of years and you will see such products in the market this year. We have 15 licensees now. This will be widely rolled out in 2013.

What are some of the new technologies you are working on?

Security and identity management of handsets is going to be

increasingly important for many applications to securely identify who you are, including electronic payments or electronic password identity. For this, we have formed a joint venture company which is focused on creating new security applications for mobile devices and are cooperating with other companies who have expertise in the field.

Another interesting trend that is coming up is increasing number of context aware applications as the device will be interacting with the location based services like interaction with sensors. For instance, the interaction with a vending

machine to buy a drink. On the technology side, we are driving lot of 3D graphic properties, so, more and more mobiles and other electronic devices, we are developing the graphic processor. The other core development focusing on the 64-bit technology, which is going on for two-three years and it has been given to licensees, which will again drive new capabilities.

Devices and the services and applications that are running in the cloud results in huge increase in server storage and power surge. So we are working with companies like HP, Dell on the ecosystem around this.

Beyond smartphones and tablets, what are the areas of innovation you are exploring?

The other area is of micro controllers. We focus from smartphones to server applications and small micro processors in sensor applications. There are a lot of other devices which run on ARM architecture base. Last year the total units were around 8.5 billion, of which only 50% of our shipments were into mobiles and tablets. The rest was for digital TVs, which grew by 150%, digital cameras, networking devices, mass storage applications, navigation devices; pretty much all electronic devices, people use our processors.

Computing is growing beyond desktop and smartphones in all those physical devices like the controllers and sensors in cars. Most of the electrical devices like motors and fans are not power efficient. If we develop an application to make them more efficient that is what we are focusing a lot these days.

We work with partners in areas like semiconductors and sensor manufacturers.

Where does ARM fit in, in the development of devices using your processors?

We may not need to be aware of where our processors are going to be used in the application or device. We give them a lot of flexibility. You can add your own IP and integrate with our IP and come with a new product. They will do the design according to their requirements by adding their own features and making it a better product than competition.

How is your India centre at Bangalore shaping up?

We are growing and is around 400 people now. This is the second biggest centre outside the headquarters in Cambridge, UK. Most of the Indian staff work on the physical IP, memory card and standard cell developmental activities, all the way from concept to delivering the product. We work on the latest

architect evaluation to implementation and the core IP development. We also provide specific foundry help to our partners while licensing our IP for them to develop further on it. It helps them to get into the volume production instead on spending time on implementation of the specific product.