The President and co-founder of ARM, Tudor Brown, has announced that he has no plans to seek re-election to the board next May, and will retire from the company at the annual shareholders meeting on May 3, 2012. Brown's history with the Cambridge UK-based chip manufacturer goes back to the Acorn computer company, where he worked in R&D on what would become the ARM infrastructure. After ARM was spun off from Acorn in 1990, Brown stayed with the company, joining the board in 2001 and finally became president in 2008. The 52-year-old has also worked as Engineering Director and Chief Technology Officer within the firm. On his departure, only four of the original twelve founders will remain with the company.

ARM is the brains behind most of the processors used in smartphones and tablets — the Snapdragon range, Samsung's Exynos, NVIDIA's Tegra, and Apple's A4 and A5 all rely on ARM Cortex architectures — but the company's designs are also found in a huge range of other devices, from connected TVs to digital cameras. ARM estimates that over 15 billion chips based on its technology have shipped since 1990.