State of the Part: SoC Manufacturers

A few years ago, it seemed a new System-On-Chip (SoC) design using an ARM-based architecture would pop up every other week. While competition can be great, with so many of the designs offering similar core features and the need to provide support for the products, over time the major players in the ARM SoC market have shifted and consolidated (e.g. Texas Instruments has exited the Application Processor space). There are still plenty of companies that ship SoCs, but some of these are lower end offerings that can't really compete except on price, leaving us with a few major players.

Depending on whom you wish to include/exclude, there are anywhere from four to eight SoC manufacturers still in the game, with three of them mostly catering to the budget sector. We could also include ARM as a company, but since they don't really manufacture any parts we'll leave that for a separate article.