10 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 63
NEWS
Broadcom and Qualcomm, a leaked memo obtained
by the BBC has revealed that ARM has ordered its
employees to cease “all active contracts, support
entitlements, and any pending engagements” with
the beleaguered China-based tech giant.
While ARM is a UK-based company, its chip
designs contain technology that originated in the
US and subsequently are believed to be subject
to the Commerce Department’s blanket ban. The
memo says ARM employees are no longer able to
“provide support, delivery technology (whether
software, code, or other updates), engage in technical
discussions, or otherwise discuss technical matters”.
While Google’s revocation of Huawei’s Android
licence might seem like a bigger story, losing ARM
could be just as devastating to the company. Huawei
is one of the few phone makers that doesn’t use
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips in its phones. Its
homegrown Kirin processors have made the P
and Mate 20 handsets among the fastest around.
The Kirin chips also include didactic image signal
processors that aid in things like low-light and
portrait photography.
However, those chips are built using the ARM
foundation, which could put future releases in
jeopardy. What’s more, it means Huawei may have
lost access to the only two chipset architectures
supported by Android: ARM and x86. So even if it
were able to design a completely new chip devoid
of ARM’s intellectual property, there’s no guarantee
that it would work with the Android Open Source
Project code. While this year’s crop of processors