Person attributes
Gerard Williams III is the senior VP of engineering at Qualcomm and the former CEO, president, and cofounder of Nuvia, a semiconductor manufacturing company that was acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in March 2021. Williams is an expert on low-power microprocessor architecture, micro-architecture, and implementation design techniques with over twenty years working with the ARM architecture. Prior to starting Nuvia in 2019, Williams was senior director in platform architecture at Apple, an ARM fellow, and design team lead at Texas Instruments.
While at Apple, Williams served as the chief architect for all Apple CPU and SOC development, including most A-series SoCs for Apple. His departure from Apple and founding of Nuvia became the subject of a lawsuit, with Apple alleging that Williams breached an intellectual property agreement and a duty of loyalty to the company by planning his new startup while on company time. Over three years after Apple first sued Williams, the company filed to drop the suit without stating their reason why.
Williams holds an MSEE in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology and a BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Arkansas State University. Throughout his career, Williams has been the inventor of a number of patents, including over sixty Apple patents.
In the summer of 1995, Williams worked as a graduate intern in the IMAP Group at Intel. He worked on Xilinx 3000 series FPGA, developing performance-gathering hardware for the 66MHz and 100MHz Pentium chips. He joined Texas Instruments as a design team lead in July 1996, helping to develop the TI TMS470 micro-controller program.
Starting in January 1998, Williams spent over twelve years at ARM as an ARM fellow, working on a number of chips, including the ARM1020E, ARM926EJ-S, ARM968, ARM1026EJ-S, Cortex-A8, and Cortex-A15 next-generation ARM processor technology. Areas of focus included processor architecture, micro-architecture, verification, performance modeling, and implementation.
In February 2010, Williams joined Apple as senior director in platform architecture, a position he held for nine years. While at Apple, Williams was the chief architect for Apple CPU and SOC development. He led the development of every Apple processor core from the A7 (the first 64-bit processor for mobile devices) to the A12X. Williams is listed as the inventor of over sixty Apple patents, including technology related to power management, memory compression, and multicore processing.
After Williams left in February 2019 to start Nuvia, Apple filed a lawsuit in August 2019 in Santa Clara County Superior Court. The lawsuit alleges that he breached an intellectual property agreement and a duty of loyalty to the company by planning his new startup while on company time at Apple, including spending hours on the phone with colleagues who eventually joined the venture. Apple did not sue Nuvia itself or any of Williams' cofounders, and it did not allege any intellectual property or trade secret theft. A copy of Williams' contract that was attached to the lawsuit required that Williams "will not plan or engage in any other employment" that competes with Apple or is directly related to the company. A filing made by Williams in November 2019 argued that Apple's contract was unenforceable as California law allows employees to make some preparations to compete while still in their current jobs. In April 2023, Apple filed to drop the suit without stating its reasoning or responding to requests for comment.
Williams cofounded NUVIA in early 2019 with Manu Gulati and John Bruno with the goal of reimagining silicon design to deliver industry-leading performance and energy efficiency for data centers NUVIA developed semiconductor components and high-performance processors designed for compute-intensive devices and applications. The company focuses on designing systems on a chip (SoC) and CPU cores that optimize computing performance, power efficiency, and scalability. The company was acquired by Qualcomm in March 2021 for $1.4 billion, and NUVIA is now a subsidiary of Qualcomm.
After Qualcomm's acquisition, Williams became the company's senior VP for engineering.
