Esin Terzioglu, who was previously the engineering vice president at Qualcomm has been hired by Apple. At Qualcomm which he joined in 2009, Terzioglu was responsible for providing direction to the technology roadmap of the company as well as leading the mobile chipmaker’s central engineering organization.

“After an amazing ~8 years at Qualcomm, it is time for me to move on to my next adventure. I feel privileged for the opportunity to continue my career at Apple,” Terzioglu wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Novelics co-founder

Prior to joining Qualcomm, Terzioglu was the co-founder, the chief technology officer and chief financial officer of Novelics, a memory provider that was later bought out by Mentor Graphics.

Until recently Qualcomm was for many years the only source of the iPhone’s cellular modems. This changed, however, with the iPhone 7 when Apple started using the cellular modem chips of Intel in some of the smartphone’s versions. It is expected that the proportion of Intel’s cellular modems in iPhones will keep growing.

Patent dispute

The poaching of a Qualcomm executive by Apple comes at a time when the two firms are facing off in court over a patent dispute. This was after Apple filed a suit against Qualcomm earlier in January accusing the mobile chipmaker of overcharging and monopolistic tactics.

The dispute started at a time when Apple was said to be developing a cellular chip of its own. Already the Cupertino, California-based tech giant has had a couple of patents filed in this area. This would, however, not be the first time Apple is building its own chips. Currently the more valuable iPhone chips including the main processor have been made in-house. But there has been a recent trend of sourcing more and more of the components from within. As an example the wireless chip in the AirPods, the W1 Bluetooth chip, was made in-house.

Apple has also indicated that it will be building a graphics processing unit of its own soon. The iPhone maker has consequently notified Imagination Technologies which is based in the United Kingdom that it will no longer license its technologies. Reports also indicate that Apple is developed a dedicated processor for artificial intelligence algorithms.