Arm rumored to produce its own reference chips, might compete with Qualcomm and MediaTek

As its IPO draws closer, Arm is trying to come up with new ways to increase profits and valuation. Earlier this year, the company already created a bit of buzz with its plans to completely overhaul the licensing scheme and now Arm is looking to produce prototype chips that better demonstrate the performance and features for all its main IPs including mobile CPU cores, GPUs, and NPUs.

The Financial Times reports that Arm is ready to team up with manufacturing partners to produce reference chips. In order to achieve this, industry sources claim that Arm has assembled a “solutions engineering” team that is already six months into the development of advanced prototype chips, which would be targeted at chip manufacturers rather than software developers.

Leading this newly created “solutions engineering” team is Kevork Kechichian, an industry veteran that previously worked for NXP Semiconductors and also helped develop some of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon mobile processors. This move is regarded with great concern in the semiconductor industry, as Arm could end up producing powerful chips that would be sold directly to device integrators, essentially bypassing the whole licensing process. Arm would thus become a direct competitor for Qualcomm and MediaTek. Of course, Arm has not released any official statement for the time being, so all the concerns may be unfounded.

It is yet unclear which foundries will produce Arm's reference chips. Arm has collaborated with Samsung and TSMC before on a number of prototype chips targeted at software developers, but, more recently, Intel announced that it will soon produce chips for Arm, so Team Blue is also a strong candidate here.

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