According to media reports on Tuesday (October 22) citing a document, British chip design company Arm plans to cancel its long-term partner Qualcomm's license to use Arm's intellectual property to design chips.
Previously, Arm signed an architecture licensing agreement with Qualcomm, allowing Qualcomm to use the intellectual property of this British company to design its own chips.
According to a latest document, Arm notified Qualcomm 60 days in advance of its plan to cancel the architecture license agreement.
At the time of this announcement, a legal battle is underway between the two tech giants, expected to officially begin in federal court in Delaware in December of this year.
Legal disputes
In 2022, this British company, majority owned by Japan's SoftBank Group, sued Qualcomm for failing to renegotiate new licenses with Arm after acquiring another company holding Arm licenses.
This lawsuit starts with Qualcomm's acquisition of a chip design startup called Nuvia. Nuvia was founded by Apple chip engineers and sold to Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021. Prior to the sale, the company also held a license for the Arm architecture.
Arm believes that Qualcomm failed to renegotiate the terms of the merged contract with Nuvia after its acquisition. Arm claimed that this move violated its license to Qualcomm and demanded that Qualcomm destroy the chip designs created by Nuvia prior to the acquisition.
According to the lawsuit filed by Arm in the Delaware District Court, these designs cannot be transferred to Qualcomm without permission. However, Qualcomm believes that its existing agreement covers Nuvia's previous activities.
Prior to this dispute, the two companies had been close partners, jointly driving the development of the smartphone industry. However, now it is on the eve of a breakup.
If Arm terminates the license, Qualcomm will not be able to use Arm's instruction set for its own designs. Although Qualcomm can still authorize the use of Arm's design blueprints under separate product agreements, this approach will cause delays in designing new products and force Qualcomm to completely waste the work already completed.
However, Qualcomm is not particularly anxious because the company has always had the idea of getting rid of the Arm architecture. On October 21st, Qualcomm unveiled its flagship mobile platform Snapdragon 8Elite at the 2024 Snapdragon Summit, featuring a second-generation custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU, and an enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU.
Christoper Patrick, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Business at Qualcomm, stated at the summit that Qualcomm's self-developed architecture, Oryon, "has completed the final piece of the puzzle for our entire SoC (System on Chip)." Patrick also referred to the mobile chip under the self-developed architecture as an "industry turning point.