ARM is the latest partner to shun Huawei, so how will it design chips?

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It looks like Huawei is not just being shunned by the US, but now, the world! According to a report from the BBC, ARM has told its employees the US export ban means it can no longer work with Huawei, dealing a crippling blow to Huawei’s SoC division, HiSilicon, and to Huawei’s ability to create smartphone chips in the future.

ARM’s interpretation of the US export ban comes as a surprise, as the company is not based in the US. ARM’s headquarters are in Cambridge, UK (hence the BBC scoop), and it was bought by Japan’s Softbank in 2016. Everyone in the tech industry is still discovering how broadly Trump’s executive order will be interpreted, and ARM believes it is affected due to its designs containing “US origin technology.” ARM has more than 40 offices around the world, including eight in the US.

ARM doesn’t manufacture smartphone chips but instead licenses its intellectual property to other vendors. The ARM CPU architecture is the dominant instruction set in smartphones and embedded computers, and it’s a rival to Intel’s x86 architecture mainly seen in PCs and servers. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, Samsung, and Huawei are all ARM architecture licensees and, as a consequence, nearly every smartphone on the market uses an ARM-based CPU. Besides the basic architecture, ARM also licenses out “Cortex” CPU designs and “Mali” GPU designs, which are often used by these licensees as a basis for their own SoCs.