ARM Announces Complete Support To Open Handset Alliance

Efforts to take the handset operating system and software application domain from the clutches of any proprietary behemoth got a boost today by the ARM announcement of its complete support to the movement.

The Cambridge, UK-based company, a market leader in the design of technology that goes into wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions. The company develops 32-bit RISC microprocessors, graphics processors, enabling software, embedded memories and high-speed connectivity products. Almost all modern mobile phones and PDAs are built upon ARM CPUs, thus accounting for over 75% of all embedded CPUs in the 32-bit category in the world.

The Open Handset Alliance is a group of 47 technology and mobile companies that have together collaborated to produce Android, said to be the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com) The Android Operating system is in itself built upon the open Linux kernel, and utilizes a custom virtual machine exclusively designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment. The SDK for Android 1.0 was released in September 2008, and its source code is now available in the public domain.

ARM has committed to contribute its ARMv6 and ARMv7 architecture-based OpenMax DL libraries and knowledgebase on the ARM CPU and ARM Mali GPU architectures to the Android Open Source project.

Read more about ARM’s commitment to the Open Handset Alliance project.