The relation is even closer that that: If you read up on the history of ARM, Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson (of Acorn / ARM) said they went to visit WDC in Mesa, Arizona when they were looking into an improved CPU for their next computer, and that's when/where they found out that designing their own RISC chip (which became the first ARM) wasn't that hard and you didn't need a fab to be a semiconductor company.

===Jac