How ARM's Licensing Model Made It the Dominant Chip Architecture in IoT

ARM traces its origins to Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England, where a small team designed their own processor in the early 1980s after finding commercial chips inadequate. Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber built the first ARM chip using a Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) approach, prioritizing simplicity and power efficiency over complexity. The ARM1 was delivered on 26 April 1985 and famously worked on its very first power-on. In 1990, the ARM team was spun off into an independent company that chose to license chip designs rather than manufacture them, allowing hundreds of chipmakers to build ARM-based products without designing a CPU from scratch. This combination of ultra-low power consumption and an open licensing model made ARM the default choice for IoT devices, where battery life can be a critical constraint.