Qualcomm licenses patents on Huawei’s LogicFolding chip tech
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
5 years ago I wouldn't have considered it but after Huawei build a total swap over OS via Harmony OS and the likes of Loongson pushing their Loongarch ISA, it doesn't seem so unlikely anymore.
China's domestic CPU tech is getting pretty interesting, their GPU's are still a long way behind however. The Lisuan 7G100 looks to be the best so far and it is fine but it is still years behind Nvidia/AMD/Intel.
I did find it neat that it ends up actually reducing overall heat despite the multiple layer wafers as signals have less overall distance to travel as they move in layer space rather than across the chip.
But my shoot from the hip thoughts are that this might end up being used more for mid range chips than high end. higher clock frequencies would probably compound the thermal laying beyond standard resistance and buffers.
Makes you wonder what is possible when applied this to much smaller node sizes. Interesting times ahead.
I mean, it is nice that they found out some properties (lower heat than expected), but you cannot patent that, I suppose.
Chips have been multiple layers since the beginning practically but it was also laid out in a somewhat 2D fashion of ALU here, FPU there, cache somewhere else, but now they are stacking functionality so that is isn't so discrete, in a 2D space it would get a little fuzzy.
It isn't mind blowing ground breaking stuff but it is very cool. Evolutionary not revolutionary.
This is not just hypothetical, there is actually a draft bill aimed at that - Prohibiting Adversarial Patents Act of 2026 (H.R. 9142)
Huawei (with PRC support) will sue/sales injunction international OEMs/manufactures that uses QC... for consumer electronics, QC doesn't make shit, US barely make shit, hence QC PARTICULARLLY fucked because essentially every producer of QC in every segment goes through PRC supply chains, including US partners like South Korea who manufactures Vietnam but depends on PRC immediate goods. PRC tells them to stop making shit with QC, they stop or PRC makes sure they stop making all shit. If device makers can't use QC, they use something else -> QC is kill.
And unlike domestic US laws, SEP enforcement legitimate/international, i.e this not where US entity lists and tries others to not HW buy, QC just becomes internationally "entity listed" for violating SEP.
There's a reason US/BIS carved exception immediately. Because this not lawfare battle US can win. And vice versa, HW still paying for US IP post sanctions and pays when losing international IP battles, i.e. 2B to QC of all people... over SEP in 2020. Because it's better to not fuck with SEPs if you want to sell globally.
But really take to logical conclusion, US global market/manufacture exposure existentially higher than PRC, US has more markets to lose and loses them harder. PRC can bypass US and make shit, US can't vice versa.
And now they are just giving it away ?
To the people that say "why can't Huawei make a 5G phone". Huawei was manufacturing their chips with 5G modems at TSMC until the US went after them trying to turn them into HTC or Alstom Energy, but it failed. It's one of the reasons why Taiwan now has zero leverage as the US has been hollowing them out since the last administration. But Huawei have been building their own domestically produced modems for a few years now.
I used to attend the communication network meetups with all the professors in Germany and mI think all of them agree that all that energy sanctioning China should have been spent on actual competition domestically in the West.
My read is that the US has over-indexed heavily on "intellectual property" and that position is profitable, but an overall net drag on innovation and research.
China is much less indexed on IP, and often outright ignores it. This allows them to be much more competitive in innovation over the long term, but at short term reputational damage.
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From the US side - if you're a company operating in a restrictive, patent encumbered space... it absolutely feels like an unfair field. Those other companies are able to ignore the restrictions you're hemmed in by (steal).
From the China side - if you're a company operating outside of compliance with licensing and IP, you get a reputation for "just stealing" even when your research is novel and impactful.
Of the two - I believe the US is "more incorrect". The current IP laws feel a lot less like encouraging innovation and a lot more like government enabled and funded rent-seeking.
For example, let's not pretend the frontier AI labs aren't violating copyrights on a massive scale.
There have been other subtle examples of US companies being cavalier as to IP over the years, but courts (and the US government) have pretty much allowed companies to do so without so much as a wrist slap.
100+ years ago, US built its own empire on IP from the mainland Europe, so it's all turntables turning.
It's funny how the US is amazing because it takes the worlds research, but China is horrible because it steals IP from companies it invests in.
Whatever, even if you ignore the company IP side of things, 8 out of 10 top 5G research Universities are Chinese now.
Not long ago I remember reading that Britain was complaining about how Germany was creating counterfeit items with british labels and that Made in Germany back then was something imposed on them to deal with this situation. It was some sort of Trade conference in Europe in the 19th century I believe, but I cannot find that book anymore.
I want to give grace to people who have outdated perspectives on China. China's journey in development is extraordinarily compressed. It's gone through more stages within a single generation than countries do in a century. People's perception will take time to catch up. Unless you're an avid China watcher, the changes in China can really surprise people.
One may worship the development, but let's not forget what China is at its core.
Huawei 20% of its annual revenue back into R&D
Edited: To reply to a child post, this is about the allegations referred to in the parent, not a statement of what I think is true now
That being said, the Chinese then went off and innovated off of it and Nortel imploded, mostly due to other poor management reasons. My mom was at least smart enough to cash out most of her equity as she got them, though. Lotta people lost everything.
Huawei: I don't even know who you are.
Terminally stupid cannucks still butt and misattributing Nortel primary fell to HW stole muh secrets, not that Nortel grossly mismanaged (and outright fraud). Hint PRC stole lots of shit back then... but Nortel fucking exploded spectacularly. Why didn't CISCO explode because HW copied some homework... because unlike CISCO, Nortel was mismanaged to shit. NVM HW wasn't even state champion at the time, that was ZTE, they didn't juicy state level industrial espionage perks. Meanwhile allegations against HW vs Nortel was over optical routing, i.e. niche shit to HW overall portfolio. It's just Canadian cope.
This not mentioning Nortel basically brought this on themselves by bamboo ceiling the shit out of Chinese employees in PRC (both international/PRC nationals). Nortel HQ/Ottawa -> North PRC/Guangzhou, i.e. from Canadians to Chinese Canadians basically all defected Nortel (and poached entire R&D teams), because North PRC wasn't giving them their dues... and not just to PRC SOEs, but western competitors like lucent/acatel etc. Defectors were bitching / organizing in my local Counter Strike server, their AFKs very disruptive, so in a sense I was just as much victim as Nortel.
There's a long history of various companies doing patent license deals like this in the telecom industry. Nokia still earns a lot of money this way, for example. Apple settled with them on a few occasions.
Speaking of which; Apple has its own 5G chips now so they are a bit less dependent on Qualcomm now. Huawei and Apple both have a lot of their own in house technology at this point. But of course Qualcomm always was a strong IP company with lots of patents and its impossible for either to make phones without infringing on at least some of those patterns. And vice versa, a lot of Qualcomm's stuff would necessarily infringe on some patents by others.
That's why these cross licensing deals like this are usually the outcome of disputes around IP.
Surprisingly, the only one standing with Apple during the case of Qualcomm vs Apple was not Nokia, Ericsson or other telecom giant, but Huawei.
Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.
Consumers will likely pay incrementally higher prices though.
If there’s more I can be doing as a good little citizen let me know. The power of the people feels like it’s at an all time low, government is overrun with money, corruption and authoritarians
No breakdown on the age of the patents though so it'd be interesting to see how things evolve over the years.
Qualcomm does more than 5 billion a year in patent licensing revenue. It's a licensing behemoth.
> Nokia reaches 7,000 patent families declared as essential to 5G
https://www.nokia.com/newsroom/nokia-reaches-7000-patent-fam...
That's now how standards work - to become 5g the tech needs to be implementable by everyone at a FRAND cost (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory). Sharing patents just means Qualcomm and Huawei won't bill each other.
Huawei is a massive R&D company - I'm sure they're contributing as much as Qualcomm
For example in telco, error correcting codes are often designed in a way, that there's an algorithm that can turn the logic into a netlist.
Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.
I'm not talking about the company which makes "Nokia Phones". I'm talking about Nokia the infrastructure company.
They've been making their own 5g phones since 2023 (mate 60)
Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.
Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.
I'll put the submitted URL (https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/10/qualcomm-broad-patent...) in the top text. A rule of thumb is we prefer the best 3rd party report to a corporate press release, when available (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). (This is a rare exception to HN's 'original source' rule in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
Someone has to tear it down, and it's not going to come from within. No balls on this side.
Like FFII.org predicted in 2006:
"In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalize software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central Unitary patent court (UPC), which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators."
Not to mention the judges in that court are part time working for Nokia or Airbus.
Apple ordered to pay $5.7bn after losing vibration tech patent suit (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6je85n2vyleo)
You can ask AI to summarise the list of when for example apple ignored patents. I get 16 cases.
China is playing the long game here because they expect domestically generated IP revenue to be significant in the future.
Huawei likely wants to manufacture global-market devices with the technology immediately, and have the technology baked into the devices at the time of patent expiration.
Neither company can ship modern cellular basebands or RAN silicon without stepping on the other's portfolio. FRAND terms make endless global litigation a negative-ROI exercise, Entity List or not. Cross-licensing is the only operational path to extract rents and lock third parties out.
Now, a chip that doesn't pay the troll toll to Qualcomm, AND ships with a cellular modem? That's hard.
1. is no longer a threat for the US
2. no longer has (perhaps never had), the lead
3. was forced to bow down because has no leverage
The US still chooses what customers China has access to
Pre sanctions, HW fine buying QC for mobile chipset StandardEssentialPatentswhile QC pay HW for 5g SEPs, with net balance favoring QC. Huawei indigenized mobile SoC + 5g hardware with Kirin 9000 in 2023. Hilariously, now that Huawei weaned off QC SoC... QC simply stuck net paying Huawei.