CENTENNIAL, Colo. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 28, 2015 — Arrow Electronics, Inc. (NYSE: ARW) today announced that it has joined Linaro Ltd., the not-for-profit engineering organization that consolidates and optimizes open-source software for ARM applications. Arrow is the first Linaro collaborator with both hardware-design and distribution capabilities.

“Arrow is excited to bring its best-in-class design engineering services, comprehensive product offerings and unparalleled global supply chain relationships to Linaro’s open-source community,” said Aiden Mitchell, vice president of semiconductor marketing for Arrow. “Arrow is always thinking five years out to help guide innovation forward, and joining Linaro is very much in line with that mission. We look forward to working with the Linaro community to accelerate the pace of innovation for the ARM processor market.”

Arrow will collaborate with its supplier and manufacturer network to design a range of standardized, open-source boards for the Linaro 96boards.org community. These low-cost, high-performance hardware designs would be accessible to an even greater number of software developers, as well as the maker community and embedded product manufacturers—effectively widening the pool of ARM innovators, accelerating the pace of their architecture innovations and reducing their time to market.

“96Boards is building a single software and hardware community across low-cost development boards based on ARM Cortex-A processors from multiple silicon vendors,” said Rob Booth, Linaro chief operating officer. “Ensuring reliable hardware production and distribution is key to developing this community and we're confident that Arrow joining as the first 96Boards Manufacturing Distributor Partner will accelerate this initiative.”

Linaro facilitates rapid industry innovation by using shared resources to engineer common software elements for the ARM architecture. This collaborative approach enables Linaro members to focus more of their own resources on product differentiation and innovation. The full scope of Linaro’s engineering work is open to all online.

About Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics ( www.arrow.com) is a global provider of products, services and solutions to industrial and commercial users of electronic components and enterprise computing solutions. Arrow serves as a supply channel partner for more than 100,000 original equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers and commercial customers through a global network of more than 460 locations in 56 countries.

About Linaro

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of open source on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 200 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top three company contributors to recent Linux kernels. For more information, visit www.linaro.org.

Arrow Electronics, Inc.
Meghan Macdonald, 303-824-4589 or 303-882-8610
Communications Manager