What simply occurred? In its ongoing battle towards VLSI, a now-defunct producer of customized built-in circuits (ICs), Intel should pay a hefty effective for infringing a patent granted virtually 20 years in the past. A federal jury in Texas has as soon as once more dominated in favor of VLSI, a non-operating firm belonging to personal fairness agency Fortress Funding Group, ordering Intel to pay $949 million. It is a sum the Santa Clara company would not need to spend for a know-how that does not even work with their newest pc chips.
The patent in query was acquired by VLSI from Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV, and in accordance with the patent troll lawyer it will trigger “tens of millions and tens of millions of infringements per second” inside Intel’s CPUs. The jury was satisfied, and VLSI bought the total quantity of damages it requested.
Patent US7247552B2 covers a “approach for assuaging the issues of defects brought on by stress utilized to bond pads.” The patented know-how would enhance the chip design earlier than the precise manufacturing course of, including dummy steel traces to interconnect layers to extend the steel density of the interconnect layers.
In VLSI’s view, the patent was nonetheless utilized by Intel for its Skylake and Cascade Lake CPU architectures, processors launched in 2015 and 2019, respectively. VLSI’s patented know-how, nonetheless, dates again to a 2005 software submitting. The patent remains to be lively and will theoretically expire in 2025.
In response to Intel, the disputed know-how is not utilized by its CPUs in any respect; Skylake and Cascade Lake make use of applied sciences developed in-house, Intel argued in courtroom, and the VLSI patent would not work with trendy processors in any respect. For sure, the chipmaker wasn’t happy by the decision and it’ll file an enchantment.
The $949 million effective is one more episode within the authorized warfare between Intel and VLSI, with the latter working solely as an empty shell and a patent troll dedicated to squeeze all the cash they will from the previous, nonetheless functioning firm. In March, a Texas jury ordered Intel to pay VLSI greater than $2 billion, whereas in April a second trial resulted in favor of Intel for an alleged $3 billion patent violation.
