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

Tom Hals - Reuters - 17/12
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?
  • Arm sees its architecture as central to Qualcomm's laptop push
  • Nuvia's core designs' transfer rights questioned in court
  • Williams claims minimal Arm tech in Nuvia's designs
  • Qualcomm pays Arm an estimated $300M annually, potential $50M revenue loss claimed
WILMINGTON, Delaware, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Attorneys for Arm (O9Ty.F), opens new tab, and Qualcomm (QCOM.O), opens new tab grilled a former Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab 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 (MSFT.O), opens new tab 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 ...
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