As open, virtual, and cloud radio access networks (RAN) gain momentum, Arm Holdings aims to cement its position as a leading enabler of 5G infrastructure.

This week the British chip designer announced the Arm 5G Solutions Lab in collaboration with Tech Mahindra to eliminate barriers to developing new Arm-based products, especially in the emerging open RAN and vRAN spaces.

While Arm is perhaps best known for the processors that power most consumer electronics, the company claims its chips are also at the heart of most traditional RAN infrastructure from companies like Ericsson and Nokia.

"Arm is a leader by a mile here," said Panch Chandrasekaran, director of 5G carrier infrastructure at Arm.“Generally if you open any base station, odds are you’ll find an Arm-based CPU architecture inside.”

Where Arm has less of a stranglehold is in desegregated and virtualized RAN implementations. Arm aims to change this by providing an environment from which software developers, hardware vendors, and service providers can work together to explore new combinations.

The lab includes all the hardware and software required to address a number of use cases including small cells, macro cells, private 5G, cloud RAN, RAN intelligence controllers, and the network core. And of course, all of them incorporate Arm in some shape or fashion.

“We believe Arm is in a unique position in the industry to drive this innovation in open and vRAN by removing a lot of the friction that exists today for a multi-party collaborative environment,” Chandrasekaran said, adding that achieving this goal requires eliminating infrastructure and operational bottlenecks to collaboration.

The announcement comes just over a year after Arm joined the O-RAN alliance. The lab is expected to open to developers in early 2022 and has already garnered broad support from Arm partners Google Cloud, EdgeQ, Gigabyte, Marvell, Nvidia, NXP, Qualcomm, not to mention dozens of service providers and operators.

Alongside the 5G Solutions Lab, Arm also announced a pair of products that promise to streamline IoT hardware and software development.

The company’s Arm Total Solutions for IoT platform aims to simplify the design process for new IoT devices and includes hardware intellectual property, software, machine learning models, and virtual hardware targets.

Meanwhile, the company’s new Virtual Hardware platform is available on the Amazon Web Services marketplace and allows customers to emulate large IoT deployments.

This, Arm claims, eliminates the need for software developers to deploy and operate large farms of IoT devices.

“Though a radical change in how systems are designed, Arm is uniquely positioned to fuel a new IoT economy that rivals the shape, speed, and size of the smartphone industry’s app economy,” said Mohamed Awad, VP of IoT and embedded at Arm, in a statement.