Arm lets manufacturers design socs without paying for license first eerst

Arm will now allow manufacturers to design socs based on its processor architecture without having to purchase a license first. The designs up to the Cortex-A53 are available through the Flexible Access program.

Arm’s new Flexible Access revenue model aims to give more manufacturers access to the company’s intellectual property without paying a license fee for a specific CPU or GPU design. Under the new terms, manufacturers pay $75,000 or $200,000 per year, which gives them access to numerous processor and GPU designs, up to the Cortex-A53 core and Mali-G52 GPU. With the cheapest subscription, one tape-out per year can be made, with the more expensive variant that is unlimited. A tape-out is a complete design of a chip that can be sent to a factory for production.

If a manufacturer has designed a processor through the Flexible Access program and wants to take it into production, a license must be obtained for the specific designs that are included in the design. As usual, royalties must also be paid per chip produced. The big difference is that manufacturers can experiment with numerous Arm cores when designing, without having to purchase an expensive license for them first.

The newer and faster CPU and GPU designs that Arm has in its portfolio are not available through Flexible Access. Manufacturers who want to use the latest designs must first pay for a license on the specific design and then they are allowed to design their own chip containing Arm’s intellectual property. In that case, too, royalties must still be paid per chip produced.

It is not known what the normal license costs are. Arm makes individual agreements about this with manufacturers. For companies like Apple that design their own processors based on the Arm microarchitecture, nothing changes. Such companies pay licensing fees for the microarchitecture. The Flexible Access model is suitable for companies that want to make socs with ready-made building blocks such as Arm which supplies Cortex cores and Mali GPUs.