Two giants suddenly emerged!
On October 23rd, according to foreign media reports, British semiconductor IP giant Arm has issued a mandatory notice to its long-term partner Qualcomm 60 days in advance, canceling Qualcomm's architecture license agreement. If a solution cannot be reached after the expiration, Qualcomm may not be able to use Arm's instruction set for chip design. Qualcomm accuses Arm of oppressing its partners.
Why did they fall out?
The cancellation of Qualcomm's licensing agreement by Arm is closely related to the lawsuit initiated by the two companies in 2022.
In 2021, Qualcomm spent $1.4 billion to acquire Nuvia, a chip design startup licensed by Arm. The Oryon architecture developed by the Nuvia team has been integrated into Qualcomm's AI PC chip product line. This week, Qualcomm also announced the application of the second-generation Oryon architecture to its Snapdragon series chips.
In 2022, Arm filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm's acquisition, alleging that Qualcomm violated the contract and infringed upon its trademark rights. Arm believes that Qualcomm failed to renegotiate contract terms after acquiring Nuvia, but Qualcomm believes that their existing agreement with Arm covers Nuvia's activities.
Arm believes that Qualcomm's use of Nuvia's settings violates the licensing agreement between Qualcomm and Arm. Arm demands that Qualcomm destroy designs created prior to the acquisition by Nuvia. According to Arm's original lawsuit filed in the Delaware District Court, these designs cannot be transferred to Qualcomm without permission. After negotiations failed to reach a solution, Nuvia's license was terminated in February 2023.
In response to today's news that ARM plans to cancel its new product design license to Qualcomm, a spokesperson for Qualcomm stated, "This is Arm's consistent practice - more unfounded threats aimed at forcefully oppressing long-term partners, interfering with our performance leading CPU products, and ignoring the broad rights already covered by the architecture license agreement to increase license rates. Prior to the upcoming court hearing in December, Arm's desperate move seems to be an attempt to interfere with legal proceedings, and its demand to terminate the license agreement is unfounded. We are confident that the rights covered by the Qualcomm Arm agreement will be confirmed by the court. Arm's anti competitive behavior will not be tolerated
Using unfounded threats to disrupt customers is Arm's consistent tactic, aimed at increasing royalty rates. However, its request to terminate the lawsuit is unfounded, and we believe that Qualcomm's rights under the agreement with Arm will be affirmed, "Qualcomm emphasized in a statement.
Close relationship between two parties or reconciliation
According to Arm's annual report, Qualcomm is the company's second largest customer. The lawsuit will begin in the Delaware federal court in December this year. However, due to the close relationship between the two parties, many investors and analysts believe that they will reach a settlement before the trial.
Arm has two types of customers: companies that use its designs as the basis for chips, and companies that only use licensed Arm instruction sets but design their own chips. Under the leadership of its CEO Rene Haas, Arm has shifted towards providing more complete designs that can be directly provided to contract manufacturers.
Haas believes that the engineering work done by Arm should be rewarded more. This transformation violates the business of Arm's traditional customers, such as Qualcomm, who use Arm's technology in their final chip designs.
At the same time, Qualcomm is abandoning the use of Arm's original design and prioritizing its own design. Qualcomm jointly established the RISC-V software ecosystem plan with companies such as Google, Intel, Nvidia, and Samsung in September last year, and also released the first RISC-V Android SoC chip for the mass market in October last year.
It is understood that Qualcomm often gets involved in patent disputes with other companies. They won a patent dispute lawsuit with Apple in 2019 and also won an appeal court ruling against the Federal Trade Commission, which accused Qualcomm's licensing agreement of being predatory.