Arm seeks to expand partnerships with Samsung, Hyundai, LG

Hwang Seon-wook, country manager of Arm Korea, speaks during a press conference at the InterContinental Seoul COEX hotel, Tuesday. / Courtesy of Arm Korea

By Baek Byung-yeul

British chipmaker Arm is seeking more business opportunities in Korea by expanding partnerships with major conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai and LG, the head of the company's Korean unit said Tuesday.

“Korea's conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai and LG are some of our big customers since 1994 and we have good relationships with them,” Hwang Seon-wook, country manager of Arm Korea, said during a press conference in Seoul. “Arm will keep supporting them to continue to strengthen partnerships in Korea.”

Established in 1990, the Cambridge-based company is a global leader in designing the architecture of mobile chips, and licenses its intellectual properties to other companies including Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics.

Hwang added Arm is ready to support Korea's move to cultivate the non-memory semiconductor industry, also known as the system semiconductor industry, as it offers its affordable licensing program Arm Flexible Access.

“To design a chip, small companies have to spend a lot of money. This makes people, who have their own knowhow and expertise in cheap designing, hesitate to kick off their own business. To help them, we recently introduced the Arm Flexible Access licensing program which allows startups to use our chip designing architecture at a more affordable price,” Hwang said.

The government announced in April that it would cultivate domestic fabless companies, which design semiconductors and outsource chip-making process to foundry companies, and foundry businesses, a type of contract-based chip manufacturer for companies that cannot afford their own facilities. Both are part of the system semiconductor industry, which is 1.5 times bigger than the memory chip business and less affected by industry cycles.

“Under the program, customers pay only $75,000 a year for a single chip. The intellectual properties available through this program include popular Arm-based processors, which account for 75 percent of Arm's Coretex CPU licenses,” the country manager said.

Jem Davies, vice president and general manager of the machine learning group at Arm, speaks during a press conference at the InterContinental Seoul COEX hotel, Tuesday. / Courtesy of Arm Korea

Arm also unveiled new chip designing architectures for neural processing units (NPUs), specialized in executing machine learning algorithms and graphic processing units (GPUs), used to accelerate graphics processing.

The company introduced the Mali-G57 GPU, Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 NPUs and Mali-D37, a display processing unit that improves display processing capabilities.

Stephen Barton, product manager at Arm, said its Mali-G57 GPU offers 30 percent improved energy efficiency compared with its predecessor Mali-G52.

“The Mali-G57 delivers 30 percent better energy efficiency, 30 percent more performance density and 60 percent improvement for machine learning. This is a leap in gaming performance and efficiency,” Barton said.

Jem Davies, vice president and general manager of machine learning group at Arm, said its new NPUs will enable its customer companies to produce low-power, high-performance neural processing chips for smartphones.

The vice president added the company is also partnering with Unity Technologies, a U.S.-based game engine maker, to help game developers create their games to run smoothly on hardware that uses Arm architecture.

“We are expanding our partnership with Unity. This will enable Unity creators to improve Arm silicon performance in their native environment and further optimize the Unity engine,” Davies said.