Under the ATAP banner, ARM plans to establish a network of approved design partners that will be trained and qualified by ARM and equipped with supporting software and hardware development tools. One potential benefit of the scheme is that as the network develops, ARM is expecting it will expand support for its Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) on-chip bus, to which ARM cores and peripherals are designed.

David Lewis, responsible for ATAP within ARM's design consultancy group, said ARM expected to grow the network to about 10 or 12 centers in the next year to cover the world both geographically and in terms of applications. Lewis said the goal was to supplement the design resources that have traditionally resided within ARM's semiconductor partners and its own design consulting group. "At our semiconductor partners ARM expertise is applied on key accounts-the area of most return," Lewis said. "We're responding to a need for more ARM design bandwidth."

The ATAP design centers will not be ARM licensees and will still need to get chips fabbed at one of the licensed semiconductor partners. But the ATAP scheme will give OEMs who are interested in the portability of their designs additional options. Alternatively, semiconductor partners may contract ATAP centers to augment their design groups.

As part of the ATAP qualification process, design centers will have to submit their methods of working to an audit by ARM's design consultancy group. "Basically the test we apply is 'would we commission these people to design a chip for us?' " Lewis said.

Lewis denied that the ATAP scheme would outlaw design groups that had not received ATAP endorsement. "There is an analogy here with Microsoft-certified Solutions Providers," he said. Lewis observed that anyone could write software to work with Microsoft operating systems, but knowing that someone is a Microsoft-certified Solutions Provider gives confidence that it will be done well.

Lewis said the ATAP scheme had been created, in part, to protect the ARM brand name by ensuring that smaller OEMs have a good experience when designing ARM cores into their products. "OEMs who have gone to ASIC providers in the past [to obtain ARM-based chips] have generally been sophisticated companies. There is a new class of OEM we want to attract who may have little or no experience in hardware at all. We're trying to give them a metric."

Lewis said that as the network developed he expected it would expand support for the AMBA as a de facto on-chip bus standard. "The network of design centers may be developing their own IP and we can work with them providing AMBA compliance test suites," he said. "If someone is designing an AMBA-based peripheral they can have a very high probability the block will work in an AMBA-based environment."