Arm Holdings designs the chip architecture that powers nearly every smartphone on earth, then licenses those designs to companies like Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung, collecting a royalty on each chip shipped. It manufactures nothing itself. Power efficiency made Arm the default for anything running on a battery, and the same trait now pulls its designs into data centers, cars and laptops. The company was founded in Cambridge in 1990 and remains majority-owned by SoftBank, which returned it to public markets on the Nasdaq.