Two Dollars and a Test Suite

By Moshe Zalcberg

October 23, 2026

The Arm-Qualcomm verdict made headlines for its $2 award. The finding that matters more is about who controls the compliance tests a custom chip must pass before it can ship.

The verdict nobody read closely

On Oct. 13, a federal jury in Delaware delivered the second verdict in two years between Arm and Qualcomm. The number that drew the most attention was the damages award: $2, one for each claim Qualcomm won. Both companies declared victory, and IMHO both had some reason to. Arm prevailed on four of the six claims. On the other hand, Qualcomm won a finding that Arm interfered with its business with Meta, plus an additional finding under its Architecture License Agreement that I think deserves far more attention than it received.

The jury found that Arm breached Qualcomm’s Architecture License Agreement by withholding two deliverables, ACKs and OOBs. To most people, these acronyms mean very little, which may explain why most coverage moved quickly on to royalties and to the $2. But they describe something we may know very well: the tests a custom processor must pass before anyone can call it an Arm processor.

What a compliance kit actually does

Arm licenses its technology in two ways. Most customers take Arm-designed cores “as is” and integrate them into their chips, under a Technology License Agreement (TLA). A smaller group, including Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia, signed up for an Architecture License Agreement (ALA) that lets them design their own cores executing the Arm instruction set. That freedom comes with an obligation. A custom core has to behave exactly as the architecture specifies, down to obscure corner cases, or software written for Arm will eventually break on it.

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