British chip designer ARM Holdings Plc posted a higher quarterly and full-year profit, helped by the growth in licensing and royalty revenue and it expects dollar revenue for 2011 to be at least in line with market expectations.

The growth in licensing and royalty revenues, throughout 2010, has combined to deliver our highest ever annual revenues, profits and cash generation, said ARM chief executive Warren East.

Order backlog at the end of the fourth quarter went up about 35 percent sequentially and about 75 percent higher than a year ago, ARM said.

On a normalised basis, pretax profit rose 47 percent to 47.6 million pounds ($76.4 million) for the fourth quarter ended December 2010. Full-year pretax profit surged 73 percent to 167.4 million pounds.

Quarterly revenue rose 34 percent to 113.9 million pounds, while revenue for 2010 grew 33 percent to 406.6 million pounds.

In the quarter, ARM said 35 processor licenses signed for a range of applications including smartphones, mobile computers, servers and smartcards.
Microsoft announced that future generations of Windows operating system will support ARM-based chips.NVIDIA licensed both Cortex-A15 and the next-generation ARM architecture for computing markets. 1.1 billion ARM-processor based chips were shipped into mobile devices.

It is generally expected that, after a strong recovery in 2010, the semiconductor industry will see more typical growth levels in 2011. With ARM well positioned to continue to gain share, we expect group dollar revenues for the full-year to be at least in line with market expectations, the company said in a statement.

Shares of ARM ended Monday's trading at 516 pence on the London Stock Exchange.

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