Wednesday was all about the plaintiff’s (Qualcomm) opportunity to make its case. Looking to put some focus on the deluge of details arising throughout the previous two days of testimony, Qualcomm honed in on two areas: defining what is Arm IP versus what is Nuvia IP and the intent of the Nuvia and Qualcomm ALA licenses. Disclosure: My company, Tirias Research, has consulted for Arm, Qualcomm and other companies mentioned in this article.
As a reminder, the plaintiff, Arm, was claiming that Arm had the right to approve any acquisition of Nuvia and all materials related to a Nuvia design were to be destroyed upon termination of the agreement, according to Arm’s interpretation of the Nuvia ALA license. In addition, Arm claimed that Qualcomm was bound by the Nuvia ALA license and that the Nuvia Phoenix CPU was an Arm-compliant derivative. In addition to its attorney that testified on Tuesday, Qualcomm called two additional expert witnesses: Dr. Murali Annavaram, Professor at USC, and Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm CEO. Qualcomm supplemented this with video testimony of Arm depositions that appeared to show contradictions in previous Arm testimony and documentation from the first two days.Throughout expert testimony, Arm has been asserting that all Arm-compliant CPUs are derivatives of the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA). Dr. Annavaran provided a tutorial on designing a CPU and SoC to demonstrate that the ISA does not drive a CPU design. According to Dr. Annavaran, you cannot develop a CPU from an ISA. As he put it, the ISA is the “handshake” between the software and the hardware. According to Dr. Annavaran, there are thousands of decisions that need to be made in designing a 15 billion transistor chip, but there are common requirements for a CPU no matter what ISA is being used. Only the design of the decoder files used for processing the opcodes and the register definition files are directly tied to the selected ISA. According to D