DreamBig Semiconductor, featured in this year’s edition of EE Times’ “Silicon 100” list of startups to watch for their chiplet technology, has been acquired by Arm. The revelation came buried in Arm’s latest earnings report, in which the British semiconductor IP supplier agreed to acquire DreamBig for $265 million in October 2025.

“The core technology centers on the MARS chiplet platform, which includes the Chiplet Hub technology with high-bandwidth memory DRAM,” the Silicon 100 report noted in DreamBig’s profile. The Chiplet Hub technology integrates 3D HBM on top of a high-performance fabric base die, providing designers with centralized control of shared hardware resources across attached chiplets.

Silicon 100 also mentioned the company’s high-performance accelerator solutions for AI and data centers. DreamBig’s network accelerator chip incorporates a remote direct memory access (RDMA) engine to support 800 Gbps of bandwidth and 800 Mpps of throughput for intensive AI workloads.

The above product outline leads to two semiconductor design offerings. First, its chiplets IP, called Chiplet Hub, enables developers to create multi-die architectures with quad-sided UCIe die-to-die connectivity. Case in point: Athos Silicon has incorporated Chiplet Hub technology in its inaugural chip, code-named Polaris, to develop a chiplet-based platform for automotive, avionics, robotics and space applications.

Second, DreamBig’s monolithic chip, Mercury AI-SuperNIC, first unveiled in January 2025, allows AI chips like GPUs and TPUs to connect via a chiplet-compatible component, while providing up to 12.8 Tbps of bandwidth. It enables direct GPU-to-GPU interconnection by employing a remote DMA engine.

The Mercury chip features a hardware-accelerated RDMA engine that supports both RDMA over Converged Ethernet v2 and the new Ultra Ethernet Consortium standards. DreamBig claims that the Mercury chip redefines 800 Gbps discrete networking for GPUs and TPUs by combining performance, power efficiency and cost-effectiveness for next-generation AI platforms.

What Arm wants?

Arm, aiming to capitalize on surging AI and data center demand, has been seeking initiatives in areas like chiplets and networking. For instance, its Chiplet System Architecture provides a set of standards for system partitioning and chiplet connectivity to address fragmentation in this emerging semiconductor design realm.

DreamBig’s semiconductor offerings, built on open standards, encompass both physical silicon and IP licenses. That poses a fundamental question regarding this acquisition: will Arm merely license DreamBig’s design offerings to its customers likeBroadcom, Marvell and Nvidia?

Here, it is important to note that DreamBig’s AI networking chips overlap with the AI silicon offerings of Broadcom, Marvell and Nvidia. That raises the question: will Arm consider commercializing DreamBig’s designs as full chips, as well?

A recent Reuters story hinted at the possibility of Arm transforming from a sole designer of processor IPs to also selling its own chips with a focus on driving AI enablement in the data center. If that is the case, could DreamBig’s Mercury networking chip become a stepping stone in this push toward developing and selling Arm’s own chips?

While industry watchers are keenly weighing this possibility, Arm’s recent courtroom spat with Qualcomm further adds weight to this premise. According to industry reports, Arm is competing with Qualcomm for data center processors supply to Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook.

A chiplets technology underdog

Sohail Syed, an engineering alumnus of NED University in Karachi, Pakistan, co-founded DreamBig Semiconductor in 2019. Syed, formerly a senior director of engineering at Marvell Semiconductor, had founded another startup, FIRQuest, in 2015, which was acquired by Corigine in 2019.

Steve Majors is another prominent figure in DreamBig’s executive team. Majors, who believes that the startup’s accelerator is setting the bar for the next-generation AI networking, is a former Intel engineering director and now serves as Senior VP of Engineering at DreamBig Semiconductor.

DreamBig, based in San Jose, Calif., has a talent pool of more than 200 design engineers in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. The acquisition by Arm is a boost for the IC design ecosystem in Pakistan in general and NED University’s Tech Park specifically, where DreamBig has set up a major design engineering outpost.

As for Arm, it shows how the SoftBank-owned IP behemoth is navigating its next move in the AI-centric design era. More details are likely to emerge in the coming days, which will determine how Arm plans to position this acquisition in the current AI-fueled momentum.

From EETimes