Qualcomm has received a lawsuit from ARM Ltd., a company owned by Softbank Group Corp. The two companies are in a legal dispute over licensing fees. Arm wants to make up for lost revenue by obtaining higher licensing fees. Previously, it tried to convince Qualcomm to increase licensing fees privately, but Qualcomm has rejected this request. Now, the two companies are in court, arguing that their licenses violate the law.
The two companies had been trying to work out a deal before going to court. While Qualcomm had paid ARM $1.4 billion to buy Nuvia, it had not yet finished that deal. Nuvia was an energy-efficient semiconductor company founded by former Google and Apple chip designers. The two companies had planned to develop a Snapdragon for PCs that would compete with Apple’s M1 and M2 processors.
The lawsuit alleges that Qualcomm violated Arm’s intellectual property licenses to develop chip architecture. ARM believes that the licenses Qualcomm received from Nuvia were improperly granted. In addition, Qualcomm’s failure to obtain permission to use Nuvia’s CPU core designs is a violation of the licensing agreement.
Arm claims that Qualcomm breached its licenses with Nuvia, which were meant to protect the Arm brand. As a result, Arm terminated the licenses between Nuvia and Qualcomm. As a result, Qualcomm was forced to destroy Nuvia’s custom CPU designs. This action has prompted Qualcomm to respond to Arm’s lawsuit.