Lawyers for Arm and Qualcomm grilled a former Apple executive on Tuesday about a key question for the future of the chip industry: Who owns the intellectual property built on top of Arm’s computing architecture?
Qualcomm’s fortunes in pushing into its laptop business are under way this week in a US federal court case in Delaware, where it will push partners such as Microsoft after the iPhone maker introduced its own custom Windows with Apple. Computers are helping to try to regain lost ground. Chips.
Arm’s flagship product is a computing architecture that competes with Intel’s architecture and is ubiquitous in smartphones and increasingly used in laptops and data centers. Competing computing architectures are the reason that, until relatively recently, most smartphone applications did not work on most laptops.
Large companies such as Apple design their own computing cores based on Arm’s architecture, but Arm also offers its own off-the-shelf core designs that are used by smaller firms such as MediaTek. Where ownership of core designs based on Arm’s architecture begins and ends is at the heart of the dispute between Arm and Qualcomm.
The companies disagree over whether Nuvia, the firm Qualcomm paid $1.4 billion in 2021, had the right to transfer its computing core designs to Qualcomm after the sale.
On Tuesday in US federal court in Delaware, lawyers for both sides pressed Gerard Williams, a former Apple engineer who founded Nuvia in 2019, on whether Nuvia’s core is ultimately a derivative of Armco’s technology or whether Armco’s technology played a minor role in Nuvia’s work.
Arm’s lawyer pressed Williams to admit that the licensing agreement at the heart of the dispute covered Arm technology and “derivatives” and “modifications” made from it.
Williams repeatedly said that he did not believe the agreement meant that all of Nuvia’s work was a derivative or modification of Arm’s technology, but admitted that the words on the page appeared to be what it said.
Arm’s attorney, Daralyn Dury, told Williams, “Maybe you don’t say that, but that’s what the contract says.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Williams replied, “but I’m not a legal expert.”
Dury quickly said she was finished with her question.
The exchange with Dury drew questioning from Qualcomm’s attorney, who instructed Williams to explain how little Arm technology was involved in the Qualcomm chips that power phones, laptops and cars.
Williams said his team of developers started with the Arm architecture and were asked to estimate the amount of Arm technology in Nuvia’s final designs. “One percent or less,” Williams replied.
Analysts told Reuters that Qualcomm pays Arm $300 million a year, and evidence presented at Monday’s trial showed Arm executives believed they lost $50 million a year in additional revenue due to Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia.
A jury verdict could come as soon as this week at trial, and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon may also take the witness stand.
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