Qualcomm licenses patents on Huawei’s LogicFolding chip tech
bloomberg.com164 points by 0xedb 14 hours ago
164 points by 0xedb 14 hours ago
https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/10/qualcomm-broad-patent...
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. Aren't Huawei on the Entity List? How can Qualcomm enter into agreements like this without getting into massive hot water? 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. What an incomprehensible and illogical comment. Huawei cannot rnforce its IP on US companies without US support. How does it give a stick to the CCP? This is not just hypothetical, there is actually a draft bill aimed at that - Prohibiting Adversarial Patents Act of 2026 (H.R. 9142) 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 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. 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. 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. 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 projects). Remember when they were telling us how important the 5G race was and how critical was for the US to lead it? And now they are just giving it away ? 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. Huawei gets a lot of research output from its many Canadian Research and Development centres HN is enamored with the reddit-style of thought that China can only ever steal from Western research. I think it's a more complicated discussion. 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. --- 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. Everyone is selectively ignoring IP. 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. You ignore IP to get ahead, and then demand respecting it to defend your moat. 100+ years ago, US built its own empire on IP from the mainland Europe, so it's all turntables turning. It's still doing exactly that. Bullying Taiwanese and European companies to move their production facilities, throwing their CEO's in prison and then offering freedom in exchange for a sale. I'm not going to sugarcoat how the EU is starving its graduates from access to capital to build things, but much of what comes from the US is research from other countries. 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 think LLMs are going to be (are) excellent at skirting IP law - 'make me something that does the exact same thing, but is sufficiently different that it can be considered novel' I think IP is the type of thing where countries that benefit from enforcing it will do so while those who get more benefit from ignoring it will ignore it. China has reached a point where they greatly benefit from IP now and may really start enforcing it. That said, I wouldn't bet on it. China has a tendency to act in ways that defy Western understanding of the world. (BTW, I love it when they do because it's one of those moments that make you go "huh?" and prompts you to investigate more. I usually end up learning something in the process. It's fun if you're into that kind of thing.) 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. Don't they put people into camps anymore, isn't it a dictatorship anymore? One may worship the development, but let's not forget what China is at its core. It doesn't even make sense. Huawei has R&D centers all over the world. Their largest outside of China is actually in India. But they also have research centers in Japan, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, the UK, and many more. They help drive research all across the globe. They and the countries they invest in mutually benefit from this partnership how does them partnering with some Canadian R&D facilities contradict anything in GP's post? They also have a ton of R&D in Sweden, Russia, Brazil, Japan, etc. Their largest R&D center outside of China is actually India Huawei 20% of its annual revenue back into R&D what are you implying here ??? they steal it from Canada RnD ?? Google "Huawei Nortel Networks". The fact is that Nortel has an enormous volume of R&D stolen from them and the allegation is that Chinese telecom providers were the main beneficiaries. 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 My mom worked at Nortel in the 1990s at their Ottawa R&D campus. As a teenager visiting, I asked about corporate espionage, hoping for a story about Cisco or something. Every one of her co-workers just belted out "China" at the same time. It was apparently an open secret that the Chinese were hoovering up IP and management didn't care. It's a bit of a shame as Nortel's telecom kit was considered top-notch (especially the cellular stuff), but it gave the Chinese an enormous amount of help catching up. 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. That was two decades ago. Things have changed a lot since then. The patents they built today are founded on the patents they derived stealing from nortel. Qualcomm needs these whitewashed patents as part of this frand deal. Nortel's patents were among the first that were critical to modern MIMO OFDM (they really were on to the future in that sense, it's not hyperbole), but most never went to Qualcomm or Huawei. When Nortel went belly-up a consortium called Rockstar co-owned by Microsoft, RIM and a few others ended up buying them for a hefty price (more than $4 billion). It's possible some of them have made their way over to Qualcomm or Huawei as part of sales over the years I guess. Nortelstans: You took everything from me. 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. Charitable interpretation is Huawei actually had R&D + academic linkages in Canada (was expanding aggressively globally), but Canada still drop in bucket, Canada R&D headcount peaked ~1k vs ~100k in PRC. Post sanction, Canada basically siloed from doing crown jewel work anyway. 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. >Huawei and Apple both ...... Surprisingly, the only one standing with Apple during the case of Qualcomm vs Apple was not Nokia, Ericsson or other telecom giant, but Huawei. 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. Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes. No corporations would enter an agreement that is pro-competition, doesn’t make sense. That’s where government needs to step up and provide some value It's a hard area for the government to navigate because IP is designed to confer monopoly power. As long as Qualcomm walks a careful line on licensing costs/behaviour, they probably think the risk of being the target of antitrust sanctions is limited or manageable. Consumers will likely pay incrementally higher prices though. You are the government. How are you planning to step up? I will continue to vote, go to every protest I can that I think is for the right cause, and yell desperately on the internet. 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 Protests never accomplish law changes - the most they can do is bring together the people who care enough about something to protest it. Asking Gemini it seems their patents covers about 25% of the number of applicable patents, behind them is Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia. No breakdown on the age of the patents though so it'd be interesting to see how things evolve over the years. AFAIK, a lot of the Ericsson and Nokia patents are legacy. Companies still need to license them, but they're not targeted at the latest generation of 5G polar codes, MIMO OFDM implementations, etc. Not sure about Samsung. Qualcomm does more than 5 billion a year in patent licensing revenue. It's a licensing behemoth. I think Nokia would probably disagree. I'd guess a large part of their $6B research budget goes on 5g and 6g related tech. > Nokia reaches 7,000 patent families declared as essential to 5G https://www.nokia.com/newsroom/nokia-reaches-7000-patent-fam... > And now they are just giving it away ? 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. 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. Only Starlink can use the Starlink spectrum too. You're free to seek your own spectrum. 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. Huawei has been leading in 5G deployments until US decides him and his allies cannot be friends with Huawei. Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement. Leading in 5G deployments yet cannot make a 5G phone? Nokia and Ericsson is leading telecommunications without making 5G phones. I'm not talking about the company which makes "Nokia Phones". I'm talking about Nokia the infrastructure company. HUAWEI Mate 20 X 5G was launched in 2019, so what exactly are you referencing here? The point is that this allows QC to sell chips in China without royalty. The US will never lead 5G because many key patents there are owned by Huawei. Same for 6G. They're just now acknowledging reality. The US sanctions itself out of the game. I m afraid if the trend continues, it may sanction itself out of the rest of the world. Nortel 2.0. Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage. Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter. It's not mentioned on Huawei page, but this bloomberg article claims that the focus in on LogicFolding architecture
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/qualcomm-... Thanks - maybe we'll change the URL to that one, since it gives more background (and for once there's a working archive link). 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.) 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? "This transaction will close following receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals" Patents serve cartels. Good luck for innovative startups trying to enter this rigged game. Two patent thieves partner up. Patents that are only going to be used for trolling shouldn't be granted in the first place. Ah yes, Huawei, that well known adherent to patent agreements. Patents just embed western monopolies and cost everyone except the sovereign wealth funds and private equity that own everything in the west. Someone has to tear it down, and it's not going to come from within. No balls on this side. Here in Europe, the Unified Patent Court just rubberstamped software patents with a smartwatch decision, saying adding a button makes the whole thing patentable, even though it's only software. 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. agree and we are in agentic era, all these patents should've no moats anymore. You know, at this scale law, is more like suggestion if benefits of not following it are better. 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. 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. QC will send them a sad emoji if their patents are violated in China. The patents are violatable now. 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. This is less surprising if you view telecom patents as a mutual-assured-infringement system rather than a moat for any single company. As others noted, Qualcomm (~$5B/yr in licensing), Huawei, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia all hold overlapping SEPs for 5G — polar codes, massive MIMO, OFDM variants — so nobody can ship a compliant radio without infringing someone. Cross-licenses are the equilibrium: litigating everywhere Huawei actually sells (outside the US) would be ruinously expensive for Qualcomm, and Huawei needs Qualcomm's portfolio for handsets and IoT. The interesting questions for me: 1) what FRAND rate they settled on, since that becomes a comp for future deals with smaller OEMs who don't have a portfolio to trade, and 2) how Entity List / regulatory approvals shape the structure — the announcement says closing follows regulatory approvals, which suggests carve-outs around what's actually transferable vs. pure patent peace. For startups the takeaway is sobering: the "patent wall" effect mentioned here means you're licensing from an oligopoly whether you build infrastructure or devices. Standard SEP mutual assured destruction. 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. Qualcomm is a patent troll, boycott. Good luck finding chips that don't use any Qualcomm IP. That's easy. Now, a chip that doesn't pay the troll toll to Qualcomm, AND ships with a cellular modem? That's hard. This tells you that China: 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 How the turntables etc. 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.
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