ARC set to turn the corner

Early next year – in February, to be precise – Carl Schlachte will mark five years as ceo of ARC International, the UK/US configurable processor vendor. Many will be surprised that he has lasted so long; not down to any shortcomings on Schlachte’s part, but rather the widely held view in 2003 that he was taking a hefty swig from a poisoned chalice. When Schlachte joined ARC, the company was, to be blunt, a ‘poster child’ for the last technology bubble, but in all the wrong ways. It raised a lot of money, largely on the assumption that it would be the new ARM. But, like its long time rival Tensilica, ARC was selling a creed of configurability. And time has told for both companies just how tough a sell that has been. However, things are moving in ARC’s direction. Evidence that the company is building real market ‘traction’ came last week at its annual ConfigCon developer conference in California. The event not only attracted delegates in the healthy hundreds, but also offered the sight – rare as ‘hen’s teeth’ – of Intel delivering a case study on how it had used another company’s technology to develop a prototype for a wireless physical layer architecture that will allow any mobile device to connect to any network. The design, based initially on an ARC featured WiFi/WIMAX/DVB-H test chip, is due to tape out this quarter. Meanwhile, having once been seen as eternally cash strapped, ARC has spent much of 2007 on the acquisition trail. In April, it bought Teja Technologies, a US specialist in heterogeneous multiprocessor software. In June, it added Tenison Technology EDA, a UK tools vendor with a strong reputation in cycle accurate modelling. Finally, in November, it picked up Alarity, a US/Russian software company specialising in optimising codecs and firmware. These three buys – and Schlachte says ARC is not necessarily done yet – provide a clearer indication of why the company is in much ruder health.