Arm acquisition by SoftBank - is it good or bad for the UK and the electronics industry?

by Roddy Urquhart, semiwiki, Jul. 22, 2016 – 

As a member of the UK semiconductor community and as an Arm competitor Monday's announcement of Softbank acquiring Arm came out of the blue. So what does this mean for UK tech and for the electronics industry more generally?

Firstly, I must say that Arm has done very well emerging from the ashes of the 1980s UK semiconductor industry. In the 1980s home grown giants such as GEC, Plessey and STC were in decline and very dependent on UK Government contracts; which were rapidly disappearing under the Thatcher regime. Start-ups were few and far between and, when I was at GEC Hirst Research, I was interested to hear that my colleagues Harry Oldham and Peter Harrod were recruited to join Acorn and work on processor chips. When Arm was spun out of Acorn they did very well to get investment from Apple associated with the Newton product and even better to comprehensively win business in the mobile phone space.

While in the 1990s the MCU market was dominated by semiconductor companies with their own (often good) architectures such as Microchip, ST, Hitachi, Motorola, TI, Fujitsu, NEC, Infineon, Atmel & Toshiba. Amazingly Arm has achieved a nearly clean sweep in replacing in-house and good processor architectures at almost everywhere but Microchip (excluding the Atmel part). This has been a very impressive achievement indeed but is it good for the electronics industry? Can an MCU really stick out from the competition just based on its memories and peripherals? I doubt it.
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