The U.K.-based semiconductor design company ARM Holdings PLC confirmed Sept. 25 that it will work with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. on current and future chip architectures, following earlier reports it may suspend business with the Chinese company.
"Huawei and its chip subsidiary HiSilicon(Shanghai) Technologies Co. Ltd. are long-term partners of ARM. [Our] latest Armv8 architectures and future architectures are technologies developed in the U.K., and therefore the partnership between ARM, Huawei and HiSilicon will not be impacted by the current situation," a spokesperson from ARM China told S&P Global Market Intelligence.
In May, the British chipmaker reportedly told its staff to suspend businesses with Huawei and its subsidiaries in compliance with a U.S. ban on the Chinese tech giant. The suspension also applied to ARM China, ARM's joint venture with a Chinese investment consortium, according to a BBC News report.
Arm's v8 architectures, which include its A-Profile, R-Profile and M-Profile versions, design central processing units that are key to enabling the computing capacity of devices such as mobile phones, according to its website.
