Qualcomm, the US-based semiconductor company, and its acquired chip design firm Nuvia has been sued by Arm, a chip technology firm owned by Softbank Group, on Wednesday
Chip technology firm Arm Ltd, which is owned by Softbank
Group Corp, said on Wednesday it has sued Qualcomm Inc and Qualcomm's recently
acquired chip design firm Nuvia Inc for breach of license agreements and
trademark infringement.
Arm is seeking an injunction that would require Qualcomm to
destroy the designs developed under Nuvia's license agreements with Arm, which
Arm said could not be transferred to Qualcomm without Arm approval. Qualcomm
acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion last year.
Qualcomm did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.
The lawsuit represents a major break between Qualcomm and
Arm, one of its most important technology partners that Qualcomm relied on for
years after Qualcomm stopped work on designing its own custom computing cores.
But the two companies have been at odds for years, with some
inside Qualcomm complaining privately that Arm's slackening pace of innovation
is causing Qualcomm's chips to fall behind Apple's processors in performance.
Qualcomm bought Nuvia - a firm founded by former Apple chip
architects - to reboot its efforts to make custom computing cores that would be
different from standard Arm designs used by rivals such as Taiwan chip designer
MediaTek Inc.
It said at the time it planned to use the new technology for
its smartphone, laptop and automotive processors. The deal marked a big push by
Qualcomm to reestablish a leading position in chip performance after several
years of high-profile patent licensing litigation with rival Apple and
regulatory authorities.
While Qualcomm and Apple have resolved disputes over
Qualcomm's patent royalties, Nuvia executives and Apple have been at
loggerheads. In 2019, Apple sued Nuvia's Chief Executive Gerard Williams III,
alleging Williams recruited Apple employees to Nuvia while he was still
employed at Apple. Apple did not sue Nuvia itself, nor did it allege any
intellectual property theft.
The deal was seen as a way for Qualcomm to lessen its
reliance on Arm. Most of Qualcomm's chips have used computing cores licensed
directly from Arm, while Nuvia's cores use Arm's underlying architecture but
are custom designs.
For Qualcomm, using more custom core designs - a move that Apple has also made - could lower some licensing costs to Arm in the short term and make it easier to move to a rival architecture in the longer term.
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