The prospects for processor technology licensor ARM Holdings plc in the automotive seem to have dimmed with the news that Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and STMicroelectronics NV have formed a design alliance for automotive that is based on the PowerPC processor architecture.

Freescale and ST claimed they are top two suppliers of ICs to the automotive sector and their alliance, including a joint design center based in Munich, Germany, involves a cross licensing of PowerPC and power and IGBT technologies. The two companies appear to have decided that PowerPC is going to be an automotive industry standard in much in the same way that ARM became the dominant processor architecture in mobile phones in the 1990s.

When asked whether ST would extend the automotive alliance to include those based on cores from ARM (Cambridge, England), Ugo Carena, corporate vice president and general manager of the automotive products group at ST, said that ST would continue to support its established processor families but that PowerPC would address high performance requirements such as drive train and “infotainment” applications.

Cerana was speaking on a teleconference organized for European members of the press. He said PowerPC and existing or coming ARM cores did not compete. However, Carena added that while PowerPC is currently suitable for high-end applications ST and Freescale expected to extend the range of applications to which PowerPC could be applied.

Paul Grimme, senior vice president and general manager of the Transportation & Standard Products Group at Freescale, painted a bleaker future for ARM. He said that as automobile makers are becoming more involved in on-board electronics they want to concentrate more on applications and software and less on the hardware and to that end they wished to simplify their lives and only deal with a single architecture.

Grimme pointed to a 2004 agreement between Freescale’s then owner Motorola Inc. and General Motors under the terms of which GM would use the PowerPC architecture. “Deals like these allow the customer to settle on one architecture,” Grimme told the teleconference.

ARM has aspirations in the automotive market, which it claims is an “ideal market” for ARM cores. It also claims to have achieved some success in chips that control vehicle dynamics, anti-lock breaking systems, instrument clusters, central body controllers, engine management, in-car infotainment and telematic systems.

However, ARM relies on the efforts of semiconductor licensors to take chips to market and achieve design-win success. With the two prominent automotive chip vendors backing PowerPC as an industry-wide standard it may find it harder to find licensors for automotive applications.