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I am reading about the TI TM4C12x microcontroller, which is available as an IC:

enter image description here

The datasheet of one of its variants can be found here: http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tm4c123gh6pz.pdf

On the block diagram on p. 48, it is shown that the MCU uses a ARM® Cortex-M4F processor.

Questions:
Is the ARM® Cortex-M4F processor sold as an IC chip (like the common Pentium chips in desktop PCs)? I thought I would be able to find a picture of the ARM processor chip, but I was not successful in a Google search.

If the answer is yes, does TI (and other MCU manufacturers) somehow put the ARM processor chip inside its own TM4C chip, so if I cut open the TM4C chip, I would find another ARM IC inside?

If not, what exactly does TI buy from ARM?

"Appendix A. Package Information" in the datasheet does not seem to say much this.

gds
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    ARM doens't make any chips themselves, AFAIK. From Wikipedia: "British company ARM Holdings develops the architecture and licenses it to other companies, who design their own products that implement one of those architectures—​​including systems-on-chips (SoC) that incorporate memory, interfaces, radios, etc. It also designs cores that implement this instruction set and licenses these designs to a number of companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products." – The Photon Jul 16 '16 at 02:34
  • Thanks, everyone! @ThePhoton I'm guessing the designs of these cores produced by ARM are circuit schematics, or Verilog/VHDL codes? – gds Jul 16 '16 at 02:41
  • @gds, there's a lot of explanation if you click through Ignacio's link. – The Photon Jul 16 '16 at 03:00

2 Answers2

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TI and others license an ARM core that is then designed into their microcontroller design. It is not a separate IC, but a different section of the semiconductor die.

The Photon
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Passerby
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ARM does not produce physical processors . ARM design & develops processor architecture, and sold this architecture's license to the other semiconductor giants like(TI,NXP,ST,ATMEL and etc). usually then fabless companies integrate their peripherals with processor core and outsource fabrication process to the fab companies like TSMC, fab company produce physical chip and send it back to the chip vendor for packaging & distribution.

Mahmoud Hosseinipour
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