Boycott ARM Holdings

Another tricky one for a lot of people but this time I can offer some assistance. Some of you may be saying 'Who?'.

Amongst other things ARM make chips that go into phones, PDAs and handheld games consoles. The brands you will have to boycott are shown in BOLD.

ARM Holdings is a British technology company headquartered in Cambridge. The company is best known for its processors, although it also designs, licenses and sells software development tools under the RealView and KEIL brands, systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip infrastructure and software. It is probably the best-known of the Silicon Fen companies. The company was founded as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology (as Advanced RISC Machines), intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine's RISC chip, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and is now the processing core for many custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

The company is considered to be market dominant in the field of mobile phone chips.

ARM processors are used as the main CPU for most mobile phones, including those manufactured by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung; many PDAs and handhelds, like the Apple iPod, Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, Game Park GP32 and GamePark Holdings GP2X; as well as many other applications, including GPS navigation devices, digital cameras, digital televisions, network devices and storage. The WLAN processor of Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) is an ARM9.

Unlike other microprocessor corporations such as AMD, Intel, Freescale (formerly Motorola) and Renesas (formerly Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric), ARM only licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP), rather than manufacturing its own CPUs. Thus, there are a few dozen companies making processors based on ARM's designs. Intel, Texas Instruments, Freescale and Renesas have all licensed ARM technology. In 2007, 2.9 billion chips based on an ARM design were manufactured.

The ARM architecture is licensable. Companies that are current or former ARM licensees include Alcatel-Lucent, Apple Inc., Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Digital Equipment Corporation, Freescale, Intel (through DEC), LG, Marvell Technology Group, Microsoft, NEC, Nuvoton, Nvidia, NXP (previously Philips), Oki, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sharp, STMicroelectronics, Symbios Logic, Texas Instruments, VLSI Technology, Yamaha and ZiiLABS.

The iPhone uses a 620MHz ARM CPU.

Warren East was appointed Chief Executive Officer of ARM Holdings in October 2001. For this role he is paid an annual salary of £415,000 and an annual bonus of £286,501. Hence his total annual remuneration is £701,501. Not a lot of recession in his house then.

He joined ARM in 1994 to set up ARM’s consulting business. He was Vice President, Business Operations from February 1998. In October 2000 he was appointed to the board as Chief Operating Officer and in October 2001 was appointed Chief Executive Officer. Before joining ARM he was with Texas Instruments. He is a chartered engineer, Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Companion of the Chartered Management Institute. He is a non-executive director of Reciva Limited and a non-executive director and Chairman of the Audit Committee of De La Rue plc. hE was educated at Monmouth School and Oxford University where he studied Engineering
Science, and Cranfield University where he did an MBA.

On 18th October, Warren East signed an open letter calling on the Chancellor to continue the coalition government's plans to reduce the public finance deficit in one term, plans which included swingeing cuts on the poorest members of society and which risk pushing this country into a double-dip recession, the likes of which has not been seen since the last time the tories took power and tanked the economy in the early 80's.

For this reason Warren East is considered to be a fully signed up member of the Big Business Society and we urge people to boycott those products that use ARM Holdings components, patents, designs and software.