Arm Holdings created the semiconductor architecture used by most modern ARM-based smartphone processors.
Arm designs processor architectures and intellectual-property cores rather than manufacturing most chips itself. It licenses those designs to semiconductor companies, which adapt them into processors for phones, tablets, computers, vehicles, and embedded devices. This business model lets one architecture appear in products made by many different companies.
The ARM architecture became especially important in mobile devices because its designs traditionally emphasized power efficiency. Companies such as Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek have built processors based on Arm instruction sets or cores, although their implementations are not identical.
Arm was founded as a joint venture involving Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology in 1990. SoftBank acquired Arm in 2016, and Arm later returned to the public markets in a 2023 Nasdaq listing. Arm's ticker is ARM.