Semiconductor IP companies

The chip you license, not buy, sold as a design rather than a part

Almost every smartphone sold in the world runs on a processor design from one company, Arm. Yet Arm has never sold a single chip. It sells designs.

The instruction set. Every processor understands a fixed set of basic commands, such as add, compare and jump. This set is called its instruction set architecture, or ISA. It is the contract between the chip and the software. A program built for one ISA will not run on a chip with another ISA unless it is translated. There are three main ISAs today:

x86

used by Intel and AMD in most laptops and servers.

Arm

used in nearly all phones, and a growing share of laptops, servers and cars.

RISC-V

an open ISA that anyone may use without paying for it. It began at a university, the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010.

Three instruction sets: x86, used by Intel and AMD in most laptops and servers; Arm, licensed by Arm and used in nearly all phones and more and more laptops, servers and cars; and RISC-V, open to anyone with no fee. A program built for one will not run on a chip with another unless it is translated.

Selling designs instead of chips. Designing a processor core from scratch costs a great deal and takes years. So most chip companies license ready-made designs for parts of the chip from specialists, such as a processor core or a graphics engine. The industry calls these designs semiconductor IP, for intellectual property. The IP company earns in two ways:

a licence fee

paid once when a chip company starts to use a design

a royalty

a small payment on every chip shipped

A few large customers pay instead for the right to design their own cores to the ISA. This is called an architecture licence.

How Arm earns without making a chip: chip companies such as Qualcomm, Apple and NVIDIA license its designs and pay a licence fee once, then a small royalty on every chip they ship.

RISC-V, the open rival. No one owns the RISC-V instruction set, so there is no fee to use it. Companies still earn from it by selling RISC-V cores and the tools to use them. India's own processor projects are built on RISC-V, such as SHAKTI from IIT Madras and VEGA from C-DAC.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

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Processor and graphics designs for licence

Processor and graphics designs for licence

The Arm architecture

Arm

with engineers in Bengaluru, designs the processor architecture used in nearly all phones and a growing share of laptops, servers and cars. It licenses it to Qualcomm, Apple, NVIDIA and hundreds of other companies. Its Bengaluru centre is one of its largest. Arm has the most job postings in this Market Segment. (More on Qualcomm and NVIDIA in Market Segment 35.1, Processor and GPU makers.)

Graphics engines

Imagination Technologies

with engineers in Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad, licenses the graphics engines inside many phones and cars.

RISC-V

SiFive

with engineers in Bengaluru, licenses processor cores built on RISC-V.

Oxmiq Labs

with engineers in Hyderabad, is designing graphics and AI engines on RISC-V, to license to other companies. It was founded by Raja Koduri, the chip architect who led graphics-chip design at Intel and AMD.

The open processor.

RISC-V lets any company build a processor without paying for the instruction set. It is spreading from small controllers to phones, cars and AI chips. India's own processor projects are built on it, and so is much of the new industry building AI chips. (More on those chips in Market Segment 35.3, AI chip start-ups.) How far RISC-V weakens Arm's position is one of the big open questions in chip design.

That is the business of licensing chip designs. These companies sell processor and graphics designs, not chips, and earn a fee and a royalty on every chip made from them. Arm leads it, and RISC-V is its open rival.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What semiconductor and chip design companies hire for.

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