Thunderclap on the chip sector. Arm has announced that it is suing one of its main partners. The lawsuit is against Qualcomm, and it relates to the firm’s acquisition of Nuvia.
In 2021, Qualcomm completed the acquisition of Nuvia for $1.4 billion. in order to strengthen the custom chip design. Thanks to the expertise of the engineers of this company, Qualcomm hopes to design the best chip on the market, a processor capable of burying Apple’s chips. For this, Qualcomm can count on big names such as the former head of CPU design at Apple, Gerard Williams, who founded Nuvia in early 2019.
In addition to several former Intel and AMD employees, there is also John Bruno, who was a system architect at Google before spending five years at Apple, but also Manu Gulati, another ex-employee of Google and Apple. and lead architect of Apple’s mobile SoCs. However, projects from Qualcomm and Nuvia may well be undermined by ARMwho has just taken the company to court.
ARM sues Qualcomm over Nuvia license
British chip designer Arm, owned by Softbank, has sued chip giant Qualcomm for infringement of the chip design trademark. The lawsuit is therefore directed against Qualcomm, and it is related to the company’s acquisition of Nuvia, claiming that Qualcomm sought to transfer Nuvia’s licenses without its consent.
The CPU architecture developer wants to get fair compensation for use of its trademark on Nuvia Phoenix cores. As a reminder, ARM granted Nuvia a technology license agreement and an architecture license agreement in fall 2019, allowing the company to modify its custom core(s) as well as design cores based on the architecture or the architectures selected by ARM.
However, these licenses were granted under certain conditions and could not be transferred to Qualcomm without ARM’s consent. ARM apparently tried to fix the issue when Nuvia’s licenses expired in March, but Qualcomm would not have kept its end of the bargain and will therefore face legal repercussions.
The company would have continued to develop processors based on the Phoenix core, which is a violation of licensing agreements, according to ARM. The two companies should therefore probably soon find a trade agreement which would allow Qualcomm to carry out its project to manufacture the best chip in the world, but it is currently threatened by this new legal action.
