Arm, Qualcomm lawyers grill ex-Apple exec in chip design battle

Attorneys for Arm and Qualcomm grilled a former Apple executive on Tuesday.

Attorneys for Arm and Qualcomm grilled a former Apple executive on Tuesday about a key question for the future of the chip industry: Who owns the intellectual property built on top of 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.

Arm's flagship product is a computing architecture that competes against Intel's architecture and is ubiquitous in smartphones and increasingly used in laptops and data centers. Competing computing architectures are the reason that, until relatively recently, most smartphone apps did not work on most laptops.

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.

Arm's attorney pressed Williams to acknowledge that the licensing contract at the heart of the dispute covered Arm technology and "derivatives" and "modifications" made from it.