Arm, Qualcomm lawyers grill ex-Apple exec over chip design IP
In a legal proceeding, lawyers for Arm and Qualcomm questioned a former Apple executive on Tuesday regarding a central issue for the chip industry’s future: ownership of intellectual property developed using Arm’s computing architecture.
NUVIA Inc co-founders John Bruno, Gerard Williams III and Manu Gulati pose at the company’s Santa Clara, California headquarters, U.S., in this undated handout photo released on November 15, 2019. Courtesy NUVIA Inc/Handout via REUTERS
In a legal proceeding, lawyers for Arm and Qualcomm questioned a former Apple executive on Tuesday regarding a central issue for the chip industry’s future: ownership of intellectual property developed using Arm’s computing architecture.
At stake in a trial in U.S. federal court in Delaware this week is the fate of Qualcomm’s push into the laptop business, where it is helping partners such as Microsoft try to regain ground that Windows computers lost to Apple after the iPhone maker introduced its own custom chips.
Massive companies like 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 Arm’s ownership of the core designs based on its architecture begins and ends is at the heart of the dispute between Arm and Qualcomm.
The companies disagree over whether Nuvia, a firm Qualcomm paid $1.4 billion for in 2021, had the right to transfer its computing core designs to Qualcomm after the sale.
In U.S. federal court in Delaware on Tuesday, attorneys for both sides pressed Gerard Williams, a former Apple engineer who founded Nuvia in 2019, over whether Nuvia’s cores were ultimately derivatives of Arm’s technology or whether Arm’s technology played only a trivial role in Nuvia’s work.
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