KOCHI:
Semiconductor and software design multinational giant ARM Holdings has tied up with Kerala’s Maker Village, enabling India’s largest electronic hardware incubator to reinforce its presence at the global level.
Kochi-based Maker Village, which functions under the Union government with Kerala Startup Mission as the supporting partner, will thus hold special training and guidance programmes under UK-headquartered ARM, which is the designer for 90 per cent of electronics semiconductor and mobile gadgets in the market.
As the first step towards the collaboration, Maker Village hosted this week a workshop on ‘Secure Devise Management at Scale’ at the facility’s premises in Kalamassery, 20 km north of here. The sessions were led by experts comprising ARM India Vice-President Kuttappa Bittiananda, Principal Engineer Kumaar Guhaan and software engineer Sanjit Panigrahi. ARM University Regional Manager (Program) Apurva Varma was the coordinator.
The next move in the collaboration will be facilitation of networking between the incubating firms at an international range, according to Maker Village CEO Prasad Balakrishnan Nair. “A chunk of the first at Maker Village use products of ARM. It is important for them to know from the manufacturer directly about the various features and benefits of the products,” he added.
While 2012-founded Maker Village has a string of high-quality hardware startups from across the country developing socially-beneficial products in cutting-edge technologies, ARM of Cambridge has been designing CPUs alongside software development tools for three decades.
Maker Village is already into similar collaborations with MNCs such as Qualcomm, Bosch and IBM. Nair noted that the tie-up with ARM will help Maker Village incubators further gain trans-continental reach, given that their products have already made presence outside the country. ARM will send experts to hold workshops in Maker Village once a month.
All classes of computing devises use processors based on designs licensed from ARM or instruction set architectures designed by licensees, ranging from the world’s smallest computer to the those used in a supercomputer. ARM-designed processors are also used as microcontrollers in embedded systems that include real-time safety systems, biometric systems, smart TVs, smartwatches and in smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, among others.
