Qualcomm announced today that it is officially licensing technology from Chinese technology giant Huawei. In a deal estimated to be worth $6.9 billion upon completion, Qualcomm will license various technologies from Huawei to integrate across its product portfolio. According to official releases, these technologies include computing, AI, networking, and more. Bloomberg reports that the deal also covers Huawei's latest LogicFolding silicon design. This is a significant win for Huawei, whose R&D teams have spent years designing a way to bypass sanctions and overcome manufacturing technology limits. By stacking silicon vertically across two sheets, LogicFolding dramatically reduces the distance between compute elements, increases efficiency, and significantly improves transistor density. The result is a 55% increase in transistor density and a 41% boost in power efficiency.

Update, 06:30 UTC, October 6: Qualcomm issued a statement that dismantles rumors that the company is licensing LogicFolding technology.

QualcommQualcomm and Huawei entered into a multi-year, broad patent license agreement that includes cross-licenses across a range of technology fields. The terms are confidential, but reports characterizing Qualcomm as a net payor on the license agreement are incorrect. In addition, assertions that the agreement is related to LogicFold are not accurate. Separately, Qualcomm has agreed to purchase certain Huawei non-cellular U.S. patents across multiple technology areas.

Since Huawei lacks access to manufacturing its silicon using EUV lithography, it uses DUV machines with LogicFolding to work around this limitation. Even so, the company claims that LogicFolding on its domestic node production will achieve a transistor density equivalent to a 1.4 nm node by 2031. For Qualcomm, whose access to advanced lithography is unrestricted, this means the company can potentially surpass Moore's Law by stacking multiple sheets of cutting-edge silicon, achieving massive boosts in transistor density and power efficiency.

This agreement will be completed after regulatory approvals are secured. Huawei sees it as a way to collaborate with the industry and share its technology under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) principles. For other technologies, Huawei's development and contributions to 4G and 5G standards are so advanced that they lead in some areas, such as near-physical-limit signal transmission technology using polar codes. Qualcomm will utilize these technologies in building its own modems and designs, selecting only what best suits its use cases.