ARM Holdings may not be a household name, but the company’s inventions are at the centre of products we use every day. The British company, which has agreed to be acquired by the Japanese technology giant SoftBank, helps power the smartphone in your pocket and the iPad you may be reading this on.

From a campus in Cambridge, ARM’s teams of engineers builds designs for microchips – the brains of a computer –which it then licenses to chip-making giants such as Qualcomm and Samsung. Billions of these chips are made a year, and they end up in almost anything that needs to do low-power computing.

In fact, the company has been so central to the smartphone revolution that the current generation of mobile computing is described as the Apple-Google-ARM axis, replacing “Wintel” – the 1990s – 2000s dominance of Microsoft’s Windows and American chipmaker Intel.