According to the latest report from Bloomberg, Arm plans to cancel the license to allow long-term partner Qualcomm to use Arm intellectual property design chips.
UK-based Arm has issued a mandatory 60-day notice to Qualcomm announcing the cancellation of the so-called architecture license agreement between the two sides. The agreement allows Qualcomm to develop its own chips based on standards owned by Arm.
The differences between the two sides focused on Qualcomm's $1.4 billion acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Nuvia is a chip design and architecture company founded by a former Apple engineer in 2019.
In 2022, Arm sued Qualcomm for breach of contract and trademark infringement on the grounds that Qualcomm did not renegotiate its license agreement with Arm after it acquired Nuvia in 2021.
Arm believes that Nuvia had a license agreement with Arm that allowed it to use some of Arm's technology to design chips. After Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia, these license agreements cannot be transferred directly to Qualcomm and need to be renegotiated to obtain licenses.
Qualcomm disagrees. The company believes that it has worked with Arm for many years, and the existing Arm license agreement between the two parties already covers Nuvia-related technology, so it can be used directly without renegotiation.
Like many companies in the chip industry, Qualcomm relies on the instruction set of Cambridge-based Arm, which develops the basic technology for mobile electronic devices. Instruction set is the basic calculation code used by the chip when running software such as operating system.
If Arm implements the decision to terminate the license, Qualcomm will no longer be able to use Arm's instruction set for its own design. But Qualcomm can still get Arm's blueprint license under a separate product agreement, but this path will cause significant delays and force the company to waste work already done.
