Suspected of patent infringement. According to relevant media reports, on March 2, a federal court in Texas, USA, ruled that Intel must pay US$2.175 billion in compensation for allegedly infringing on others’ semiconductor manufacturing patents. This was one of the largest patent infringement cases in U.S. history, and Intel later stated that it would appeal. On the same day, the federal district court in Texas ruled that Intel was suspected of infringing two patents held by VLSI Technology. The court ordered the defendant Intel to pay US$1.5 billion for one patent and US$675 million for the other, for a total of US$2.175 billion.
Intel denied this, but was rejected by the court. Intel claimed that one of the patents was invalid because it involved the work of Intel engineers, but the court did not accept it. Intel's lawyers stated during the trial that these patents once belonged to NXP Semiconductors. In addition, VLSI, the plaintiff, was founded four years ago and does not have any related products. Their main economic income relies on litigation for compensation.
Intel’s lawyer said that VLSI randomly took out two patents that no one had used in the past ten years, and then demanded up to 2 billion US dollars in compensation. This kind of practice of the company It is intolerable, they are a tax on truly innovative companies, and VLSI cannot recover more than $2.2 million.
According to reports, one of the patents in this case was awarded to the semiconductor company Freescale in 2012, and the other was awarded to the company SigmaTel in 2010. Freescale later acquired SigmaTel. NXP subsequently acquired Freescale and thus obtained these two patents.
Information shows that in 2019, these two patents have been transferred from NXP to VLSI. VLSI lawyers said that the new inventions contained in these two patents can effectively improve the performance and speed of processors, which are two very important indicators in competition in the same market. Intel did not understand whether it was using other companies' patents when using related technologies, so this was a deliberate disregard.
The court stated that Intel did not intentionally infringe on patents. Otherwise, the amount of financial compensation may be higher, even two to three times the compensation awarded by the court. The amount of compensation this time is equivalent to half of Intel's profit last year. In the past 30 years, Intel has been the global leader in the semiconductor market. However, in the era of smartphones and artificial intelligence, its position has begun to decline.
It is worth noting that due to the severe storm in Texas, the trial was postponed for a full week. Intel had hoped to postpone the trial, but was refused.