Arm, Qualcomm Case Goes to Court Over Arm Architecture Licenses

By Jim McGregor, EETimes (December 16, 2024)

After almost three years since the acquisition of Nuvia and two years of legal wrangling between Arm and Qualcomm, the lawsuit filed by Arm is going to trial in the U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. The case is to be decided after up to a week of testimony and the result will impact the entire Arm ecosystem in one way or another.

At issue are the terms of the Architecture License Agreement (ALA) that allows Arm licensees to develop custom CPU cores that leverage the Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Arm believes that Qualcomm used Nuvia technology to develop its latest Oryon processors for PCs, smartphones and automotive applications, and that Nuvia did not have the rights to assign the rights to IP developed on the ALA to Qualcomm through the acquisition. Qualcomm believes that the Nuvia ALA is not tied to the processor microarchitecture, or the underlying processor design, and that its Arm ALA agreement covers its new processors developed with the Nuvia team.

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