According to relevant media reports, on March 2, a federal court in Texas ruled that Intel should pay $265,438+75 million for allegedly infringing other people's semiconductor manufacturing patents. This is one of the biggest patent infringement cases in American history. Afterwards, Intel said it would appeal. On the same day, the U.S federal district court ruled that Intel was suspected of infringement? VLSI Technology holds two patents. The court ruled that the defendant Intel paid $65.438+0.5 billion for one patent and $675 million for the other patent, totaling $265.438+0.75 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 adopt it. During the trial, Intel's lawyer said that these patents once belonged to NXP Semiconductors, and VLSI Company, as the plaintiff, was established four years ago and had no related products. Their main economic income is to get compensation by going to court.
Intel's lawyer said that VLSI randomly took out two patents that had not been used in the past ten years, and then demanded compensation of up to $2 billion. This practice of the company is intolerable. They tax truly innovative companies, and VLSI can't get more than $2.2 million in compensation.
It is reported that one patent in this case was granted to Freescale, a semiconductor company, in 20 12, and the other was granted to SigmaTel in 20 10. Freescale later acquired SigmaTel. Subsequently, NXP acquired Freescale, thus obtaining these two patents.
Information shows that in 20 19, 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 similar market competition. Intel didn't know whether other companies' patents were used when using related technologies, so it deliberately ignored them.
The court said that Intel did not intentionally infringe the patent. Otherwise, the amount of economic compensation may be higher, even two or three times that 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 dominated the global semiconductor market, but in the era of smart phones and artificial intelligence, its position began to decline.
It is worth noting that the trial was postponed for a whole week because of the big storm in Texas. Intel had hoped to postpone the trial, but it was rejected.