Intel's x86 architecture reigns supreme on PCs and millions of servers. Anywhere else, the ARM processors have won

ARM is more valuable as a standalone company and a buyer would be wasting money, said company CEO Warren East. The chip designer rose last week to an eight-year high on takeover talk.

ARM CEO Warren East said the company was planning to hire about 100 more engineers in 2010 - the first headcount additions for four years - mainly to work on high-end processors that are used in smartphones and netbooks.

Apple has bought Intrinsity, the Texas-based chip outfit that (supposedly) played a role in the design of the chip driving the iPad.

Currently, Apple pays royalties for ARM's chip designs used in its products. If the company acquired ARM, it could conceivably raise licensing costs to rivals or even take ARM designs off the market.

Representatives from GlobalFoundries and TSMC said their companies are focused on tighter cooperation with EDA and IP vendors. The comments were part of a panel discussion at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference, held last week in Dresden, Germany.

About this time last year, Intel and TSMC announced a groundbreaking deal. The deal was seen as a response by Intel to the growing popularity of customized ARM chips, but a lack of customer demand has put the partnership on hiatus.

Their system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform is based on ARM's Cortex-A9 processor and Globalfoundries' 28nm manufacturing process, and will be used in smartphones, tablets and smartbooks.

"Although netbooks are small today - maybe 10% of the PC market at most - we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market...," according to company CEO Warren East.

By the end of 2011, ARM will be a "small but significant" PC processor architecture, said a Gartner analyst.

Samsung, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments already use ARM designed chip cores. Intel used to have an ARM license too, but flogged it to Marvell.

The IBM eDRAM in 32nm SOI technology is the fastest embedded memory announced to date, achieving latency and cycle times of less than 2 nanoseconds.

Semiconductor makers are often among the first to see sales and earnings fall when a recession like this one comes along. But as the recession comes to an end, chip companies are usually among the first to come out of it.

A delegation of Chinese Government officials and technology companies are in the UK this week looking for technology expertise and business partnerships.

Nokia's strategic relationship with Intel, announced last month, may be very forward-looking and not about to worry any incumbent wireless chipset suppliers, but it is nonetheless threatening to Europe's local hero, ARM Holdings.