Qualcomm chief executive Paul Jacobs said he hopes to avoid "Armageddon" in a week's time when a patent agreement between the chip maker and Nokia expires.
Qualcomm, the dominant supplier of chips for phones based on CDMA technology, has been in talks for months to renew a technology licensing agreement with Nokia, the biggest maker of mobile phones.
The agreement expires on April 9th, and Qualcomm has repeatedly said discussions remain deadlocked.
"The two teams are pretty polarised. I'm hopeful that we can avoid Armageddon and a massive escalation but it's hard to know," Jacobs told the Financial Times.
Referring to Nokia's unilateral option to extend the agreement until December, Jacobs said: "There's various degrees of disagreement over how the mechanics of that might work."
Nokia's chief financial officer, Rick Simonson, said Qualcomm's patents play less of a role in the W-CDMA 3G standard and so royalties should be lower.