Apple Renews Licensing Deal With Imagination Technologies For Border IP Use

Imagination Technologies based in the UK has just announced on its website a new licensing deal with Apple. The latter will pay licensing fe...

Imagination Technologies based in the UK has just announced on its website a new licensing deal with Apple. The latter will pay licensing fees for broader IP use for many years. The statement did not mention the intellectual property rights were included in the deal, only that following February 6, 2014, it was a multi-year, multi-purpose licensing arrangement extended by both parties:

London, UK; 2nd January 2020 – Imagination Technologies ("Imagination") announces that it has replaced the multi-year, multi-use license agreement with Apple, first announced on February 6, 2014, with a new multi-year license agreement under which Apple has access to a wider range of Imagination's intellectual property in exchange for license fees.

Imagination will grant Apple the right to use the related IP in return for the appropriate licensing fees under the agreement. The two firms had previously worked together on GPU architecture (PowerVR).

Although Apple launched its own GPU architecture in the A11 Bionic chip of iPhone 8 and iPhone X in 2017, still, on some models of iPad, Apple Watch Series 3 and Apple TV 4K, SoCs with integrated Imagination PowerVR GPUs are still identifiable.

In April 2017, Imagination announced that Apple plans to stop using the company's IP in its hardware design by 2019. Given that Imagination relies heavily on the licensing fees from the iPhone maker (approximately $81 million in fiscal 2017), the impact of this "breakup" is quite profound.

Imagination entered the "Dispute Resolution Procedure" soon afterward, accusing Apple of unauthorized use of the confidential information and intellectual property. However, Apple maintains that the company stopped embracing the new IP from Imagination in 2015.