Chinese phone manufacturers that use Qualcomm hardware generally do respect the royalty system. Though they pay a lower total royalty because of a 2015 antitrust action in China, which forced Qualcomm to calculate royalties on 65% of the net selling price of devices sold for use in China, rather than 100% used in most of the rest of the world. (For those unfamiliar, Qualcomm's royalties are not a flat fee per device/modem, they're calculated as a percentage of the total selling price of the finished device, sometimes with a negotiated cap.)
China is playing the long game here because they expect domestically generated IP revenue to be significant in the future.
They're not giving it away, rather they're essentially forming a patent oligopoly. Huawei and Qualcomm together hold the bulk of patents for 5G. It's of no value to them to try to litigate against each other. Here they're getting a cross-licensing deal that will solidify their patent licensing wall/revenues.
The alternative would be trying to file court cases outside the US for Qualcomm, which is where Huawei does most of its business and infringing.
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.
I'm surprised that people don't know the patent landscape. The US may be leading 5G patents in total numbers, probably by multinational corps. But 8 out of 10 top university contributions come from China and Huawei is the largest single company contributor in 5G research. Qualcomm wouldn't make an agreement with Huawei if they didn't need to.
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.
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
I don't understand how standards are allowed to be patent encumbered - I get it they aren't really, but more often than not (like with the Oracle vs Google Java lawsuit) there's just one possible and obvious way to implement patents thats both efficient and correct.
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.
I dont't like patent-encumbered standards neither, but I guess the idea is that developing a technology (which will be turned into a standard) is expensive, so the people (companies really) that do it should get paid for it. The more recent mobile standards really seem to be quite sophisticated technologies.
It's not like the standards have official legal status. You're allowed to develop your own mobile network technology that isn't 5G and doesn't infringe any patents - the government isn't saying that only 5G can be 5G, so it's a theoretically fair playing ground.
In this case they literally are - if you broadcast in the 5G spectrum, you better have your devices certified, otherwise the local broadcasting authority (which would be the FCC in the US) will ruin your day.
Big companies were sometimes getting sanction waivers. In energy, Exxon for example has been getting waivers to keep investing in Russian oil and gas since 2014. They got out in 2022 though, and the waivers stopped (I've no idea which ended first, the waivers or Exxon's interest in those project).
IIRC US/BIS carved out exemptions for intangibles like SEP patent licenses. Entity list for controlled goods export/import. Regardless, US would also be stupid not to pay Huawei, PRC pays $4 for every $1 she receives for IP, ~30B deficit, most to US. PRC takes home more $$$ if US tries to lawfare it's way out of paying. But bigger stick is PRC entrenched in supply chains enough that Huawei (with PRC pressure) can sue OEMs (patent enforcement happens at device level)... all domestic PRC manufactures, foxconn, samsung, apple (really anyone that uses PRC supply chains at all) on chopping block, i.e. functionally global sales injunction against any 3/4/5g hardware that uses QC which has to use HW SEPs, which covers their entire portfolio... mobile, auto, iot, edge comptue... aka QC dead if it doesn't pay.
Huawei can enforce its patents on any device manufactured in China, regardless of if it's for a US customer or not. Which is what the parent comment is saying.
US domestic law for US territories, AKA it's Super Ineffective!
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 other 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 stills 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 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.
Can the US government prove they did (a headline is not proof)? Can Qualcomm even enforce patents against Huawei anyway, or vice versa? Maybe they're just handshake-agreeing on the status quo.
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/SEPs... QC simply stuck net paying Huawei.
Interesting. LogicFolding is something that seems so obvious in retrospect and yet somebody has to be the first to do it.
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.
It is probably like a lot of patents, some very specific details on design and the technology of interconnects between layers.
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.
It seems fundamentally easier to do the alignment in the lithography step as you only have get it correct once in the mask instead of correct for every chip every time.
I suppose you could say it's an obvious thing to try but not to implement. I remember proposing something along those lines here >10 years ago but I didn't have a good comeback for how you'd address the heat dissipation problems, or enough know-how to justify trying to research it more seriously.
Pretty much, that was why I was surprised that power use declined doing this. The reduced of signal resistance has a greater off sets than the additional thermal layers.
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.
> Qualcomm and Huawei have inked a new broad patent licensing agreement on AI, 5G, and networking, though the LogicFolding chip tech is not part of this deal. The US chipmaker has clarified the assertions made regarding the new chipset technology.
Meta question, but is the title of this article disappearing for others on HN? I'm unable to click. It seems all huawei.com links on this site have the same issue. Is it just me?
A Chinese technology/military propagandist I follow asserted today that Huawei is getting net revenue from Qualcomm on this deal, marking a change from being a buyer/licensor of western technology to a provider. I don't know if it's true but this individual historically promotes the Chinese state view via selective presentation of facts rather than made-up claims.
I do wonder if Huawei will eventually just pivot to their own ISA so they can cut even more royalties?
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.
Probably, I see a lot of RISC-V chips coming out of China and they are fine for what they are. Progress is pretty good nowadays but they have a while to go.
As for the software, this is why I mentioned Lisuan and not Moore Threads. Lisuan's drivers are mediocre but they work. Moore Threads software is a total disaster to the point were the cards tend to perform WAY below what, on paper, their cards should be able to do.
It is an uphill battle when it comes to software because without that, your hardware is useless. Just ask Intel with their iAPX and Itanium processors. Intel couldn't overcome the software mote despite being THE processor manufacturers at those times.
Perhaps outdated but when I was hunting a Loongson laptop (just recently deprecated by OpenBSD) I got the vibe most Chinese nationals wanted x86 and pirated Windows to use software like anyone else.
That sadly matches the conclusion I reached after years of following that processor arch online. It just doesn't seem anyone is willing to do the hard work of maintaining something different. Other than Apple and that has its own issues...
Even current apple is not the apple that gained the big initial momentum that got it where it is. No revolutionary products or services for decade+, just milking user base and heavily investing into marketing around supposed privacy. You can take ie their phone and compare it with 5 year old model and struggle to find differences (which is valid for most but not all manufacturers at this point).
Market is simply too mature and saturated and moving phones into foldable phablets/tablets is an evolution at best. Also it started and was perfected elsewhere so nothing novel or shocking and 0 WOW factor.
Pretty much. It is an uphill battle for them in terms of mind share. It doesn't help that their top end chips are still a few years behind most new x86 chips on general work loads, and they are WAY behind on more specific things like encryption/decryption stuff due to lack of dedicated ASIC's for them.
> Qualcomm and Huawei have inked a new broad patent licensing agreement on AI, 5G, and networking, though the LogicFolding chip tech is not part of this deal. The US chipmaker has clarified the assertions made regarding the new chipset technology.
79 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 10.0 ms ] threadChina is playing the long game here because they expect domestically generated IP revenue to be significant in the future.
And now they are just giving it away ?
Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.
Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.
Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.
Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.
No breakdown on the age of the patents though so it'd be interesting to see how things evolve over the years.
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.
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.
https://insights.greyb.com/5g-patent-landscape/
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.
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 other 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 stills 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 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.
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/SEPs... QC simply stuck net paying Huawei.
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
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.
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.
Perhaps given the difficulty of acquiring and (using?) ASML machines, Huawei is looking for alternative routes to get there. Innovative nevertheless.
Makes you wonder what is possible when applied this to much smaller node sizes. Interesting times ahead.
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.
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.)
There is contrary reporting too on whether "Logicfolding" tech is part of the deal -- https://www.huaweicentral.com/qualcomm-refutes-huawei-logicf...
> Qualcomm and Huawei have inked a new broad patent licensing agreement on AI, 5G, and networking, though the LogicFolding chip tech is not part of this deal. The US chipmaker has clarified the assertions made regarding the new chipset technology.
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.
Half of the GPU game is software. I have yet to see what excellent Chinese looks like.
As for the software, this is why I mentioned Lisuan and not Moore Threads. Lisuan's drivers are mediocre but they work. Moore Threads software is a total disaster to the point were the cards tend to perform WAY below what, on paper, their cards should be able to do.
It is an uphill battle when it comes to software because without that, your hardware is useless. Just ask Intel with their iAPX and Itanium processors. Intel couldn't overcome the software mote despite being THE processor manufacturers at those times.
Market is simply too mature and saturated and moving phones into foldable phablets/tablets is an evolution at best. Also it started and was perfected elsewhere so nothing novel or shocking and 0 WOW factor.
https://www.huaweicentral.com/qualcomm-refutes-huawei-logicf...
> Qualcomm and Huawei have inked a new broad patent licensing agreement on AI, 5G, and networking, though the LogicFolding chip tech is not part of this deal. The US chipmaker has clarified the assertions made regarding the new chipset technology.