While Arm is a fabless semiconductor company (it does not manufacture or sell its own chips), it licenses the ARM architecture family design to a variety of companies.
Those companies in turn sell billions of ARM-based chips per year—12 billion ARM-based chips shipped in 2014,[1]
about
24 billion ARM-based chips shipped in 2020,[2]
some of those are popular chips in their own right.
ELAN Microelectronics Corporation is an IC designer and provider of 8-bit microcontrollers and PC Peripheral ICs. Headquartered in Hsinchu Science Park, the Silicon Valley of Taiwan, ELAN's microcontroller product range includes the following:
EM78PXXX Low Pin-Count MCU Family
EM78PXXX GPIO Type MCU Family
EM78PXXXN ADC Type MCU Family
These are clones of the 12- and 14-bit Microchip PIC line of processors, but with a 13-bit instruction word.
Espressif Systems, a company with headquarters in Shanghai, China made its debut in the microcontroller scene with their range of inexpensive and feature-packed WiFi microcontrollers such as ESP8266.
Until 2004, these μCs were developed and marketed by Motorola, whose semiconductor division was spun off to establish Freescale. In 2015, Freescale was acquired by NXP.
Holtek Semiconductor is a major Taiwan-based designer of 32-bit microcontrollers, 8-bit microcontrollers and peripheral products. Microcontroller products are centred around an ARM core in the case of 32-bit products and 8051 based core and Holtek's own core in the case of 8-bit products. Located in the Hsinchu Science Park ([1]), the company's product range includes the following microcontroller device series:
HT32FXX 32-bit ARM core microcontroller series using Cortex-M0+, M3 and M4 cores
Infineon offers microcontrollers for the automotive, industrial and multimarket industry. DAVE3, a component based auto code generation free tool, provides faster development of complex embedded projects.
XC800 family Based on the 8051 architecture the XC800 is divided into the A-(Automotive) and I-(Industrial) Family, providing low cost micros, for example applied in applications like body, safety, motor control, intelligent lighting and electro mobility
Infineon XMC4000[2] is an ARM Cortex M4F based microcontroller family for industrial applications.
TriCore™ family is based on a unified RISC/MCU/DSP processor core. Infineon launched the first generation of AUDO (Automotive unified processor) in 1999. The TC1782 is the first member of the AUDO MAX family designed for automotive applications
Infineon XMC1000[3] is a 32-bit Industrial Microcontroller ARM® Cortex™-M0, 32 MHz.
Nordic Semiconductor is a company with headquarters in Trondheim, Norway offering low power Bluetooth Low Energy SoCs as well as cellular network connectivity solutions for IoT devices.
These were formerly made by Ubicom, former Scenix Semiconductor. The SX die has been discontinued by Ubicom. Parallax has accumulated a large stock of the dies and is managing the packaging.
SX-18, 20, 28, 48 and 52 versions (Note that the SX-18 and SX-52 have been discontinued)
Renesas is a joint venture comprising the semiconductor businesses of Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric and NEC Electronics, creating the largest microcontroller manufacturer in the world.
Rockwell semiconductors (now called Conexant) created a line of 6502 based microcontrollers that were used with their telecom (modem) chips. Most of their microcontrollers were packaged in a QIP package.
Manufactures a line of 8-bit 8051-compatible microcontrollers, notable for high speeds (50–100 MIPS) and large memories in relatively small package sizes. A free IDE is available that supports the USB-connected ToolStick line of modular prototyping boards. These microcontrollers were originally developed by Cygnal. In 2012, the company introduced ARM-based mixed-signal MCUs with very low power and USB options, supported by free Eclipse-based tools. The company acquired Energy Micro in 2013 and now offers a number of ARM-based 32-bit microcontrollers.
Silicon Motion's SM321E and SM324 controllers support SLC and MLC NAND flash from Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba and ST Micro as well as flash products from Renesas, Infineon and Micron. The SM321E is available in a 48-pin LQFP package and a 44-pin LGA package. The SM321E supports up to 4 SLC or MLC NAND flash chips with 4 bytes / 528 bytes ECC
SM324 – USB 2.0
Supports dual-channel data transfer at read speeds of 233× (35 MB/s) and write speeds of 160× (24 MB/s), making it the fastest USB 2.0 flash disk controller in the market. The SM324 also has serial peripheral interface (SPI) which allows for not only Master and Slave modes, but the flexibility to develop more functionality into USB flash disk (UFD) products such as GPS, fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth and memory-capacity display. The SM324 is available in a 64-pin LQFP package. The SM324 supports 8 SLC or MLC NAND flash chips with 4 bytes / 528 bytes ECC.
While Synopsys does not manufacture or sell chips directly, Synopsys licenses the ARC Processor design to a variety of companies that, as of 2020, ship about 1.5 billion products based on ARC processors per year.[2]
Ubicom's IP2022 is a high performance (120 MIPS) 8-bit microcontroller. Features include: 64k flash code memory, 16 KB PRAM (fast code and packet buffering), 4 KB data memory, 8-channel A/D, various timers, and on-chip support for Ethernet, USB, UART, SPI and GPSI interfaces.
IP3022
IP3022 is Ubicom's latest high performance 32bit processor running at 250 MHz featuring eight hardware threads (barrel processor). It is specifically targeted at Wireless Routers.
The Western Design Center licenses the 65C02 and 65816 designs to a variety of companies.
Those companies produce the 6502 (typically as part of a larger chip) in quantities over a hundred million units per year.[11]
