Apple Inc on Tuesday broadened a legal attack on Qualcomm Inc, arguing to a US federal court that license agreements that secure the chipmaker a cut of every iPhone manufactured were invalid.
If successful, Apple’s attack would undermine a core tenet of Qualcomm’s business model.
“Apple is trying to distract from the fact that it has made misleading statements about the comparative performance of its products, and threatened Qualcomm not to disclose the truth,” Qualcomm general counsel Don Rosenberg told reporters in an e-mailed statement.
Apple sued San Diego-based Qualcomm in January, saying the chipmaker improperly withheld US$1 billion in rebates because Apple helped South Korean regulators investigate Qualcomm.
Apple’s initial lawsuit was a relatively narrow one focused on whether it violated a contract with Qualcomm by helping regulators that were investigating Qualcomm’s business practices.
However, the new filing expands Apple’s claims and seeks to stop Qualcomm’s longstanding business model using a legal theory based on a ruling last month.
The US Supreme Court made it harder for manufacturers and drug companies to control how their products are used or resold, ruling last month against printer company Lexmark International Inc in a patent dispute over another company’s resale of its used ink cartridges.
In a brief, Apple took aim at Qualcomm’s practice of requiring customers to sign patent license agreements before purchasing chips, known in the industry as “no license, no chips.”
The license allows Qualcomm to take a percentage of the overall selling price for the iPhone in exchange for supplying the modem chips that let the phones connect to cellular data networks.
Apple argued that the ruling involving Lexmark showed that Qualcomm was entitled to only “one reward” for its intellectual property and products.
Qualcomm should be allowed to charge for either a patent license or a chip, but not both, Apple said.
Apple wants to be able to buy chips without signing the license agreement that forces it to pay a part of the overall iPhone sale price.
“As Apple recently acknowledged, it is rarely first to market with any new technology, which shows it is relying heavily on the R&D [research and development] investments in the most revolutionary technologies by companies like Qualcomm. We are confident these truths will prevail in our legal disputes with Apple,” Rosenberg said.
Apple has also asked the court to stop lawsuits that Qualcomm had filed against Foxconn Technology Group (富士康) and three other contract makers that assemble the iPhone on Apple’s behalf and are the formal buyers of Qualcomm’s chip, as is standard in the electronics industry.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)