LG might be planning to make ARM chips

LG is famous for making ARM-powered Smartphones and tablets, but this is the first time the Korean electronics giant expressed its desire to manufacture its own ARM-based processors for the rapidly increasing smartphone and tablet market.

LG enters in an agreement yesterday with that will allow the company to manufacture these chips using ARM technology. This license covers the high performance, low-power ARM Cortex processor and ARM Mali GPU families which in turn includes the Cortex-A15 MPCore and Cortex-A9 MPCore processors, as well as the ARM Mali-T604 GPU and ARM CoreLink interconnect and system IP. LG is looking to not only leverage its smartphone and tablet technology, but also to extend it to digital TV, set top boxes (STB) and most likely smart grids.

"LG’s relationship with ARM over a number of years has provided significant value to our overall business. In addition, the ARM ecosystem has provided LG with partners to help differentiate our product offering," said Boik Sohn, VP and Head of System IC Center, LG Electronics.

LG is not the only player to manufacture its own chips. In fact Samsung has been making its own set of mobile processors for long now, and Apple recently acquired the company it used to give chip contracts to.

There is no time-line or cost defined for this set of chips but don’t be surprised to see them in the current calendar year.

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