Nvidia Used three Samsung patents in tablets
Chipmaker Nvidia used in their Tablets three Samsung patents, and violated Samsung's patents claims. This is what a judge from the American International Trade Commission (USITC) in the USA ruled this week.
USITC will investigate if measures need to be taken, the commission can acutally prohibit sales and import from Nvidia in the United States. The patented technologies all have been used in Nvidia's Shield tablets, one of these patents expires next year (2016). Nvidia argued that Samsung’s patents date back to the 1990s, covering older technology that’s no longer used in modern chip designs. Its lawyers argued that Samsung had “chosen three patents that have been sitting on the shelf for years collecting nothing but dust.”
Samsung
The lawsuit was a claim from Korea based Samsung and a direct response to an earlier lawsuit that Nvidia filed against Samsung. Nvidia at that time claimed that Samsung and chipmaker Qualcomm used three of their patents embedded into theit GPU technology. On thr 15th of December USITC ruled that Samsung did not breach two of the three patens claims. Samsung did make use of a 3rd one, but according to the ruling it was ruled not valid. The trade agency staff, which acts as a third party in the case on behalf of the public, recommended that the judge find that Nvidia had infringed two of the three patents. One of the two is the patent that expires next year.
Patents 6.173.349, 6.147.385 and 7.804.734 are at discussion here and involve a type of sram-cel and two patents on a methodology to achieve less latency in the bus-sytem, the data-signal buffers and system memory..
The case also involves some of Nvidia’s customers, including Biostar Microtech International Corp., Jaton Corp., and EliteGroup Computer Systems Co.
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That seems pretty safe, I guess I wouldn't mind that.
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Watch out for paper cuts though.
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Serious question - how does a company like Samsung figure out that Nvidia infringes on such obscure patents like this? Color me ignorant, but these infringed designs don't seem like something you can obviously spot. Samsung, to my knowledge, has nothing to do with the manufacturing or design process of nvidia products.
This isn't the first time something like this has come up, so I find it real suspicious that these companies are able to know about these infringements so easily, if at all.
Senior Member
Posts: 7449
Joined: 2006-09-24
Serious question - how does a company like Samsung figure out that Nvidia infringes on such obscure patents like this? Color me ignorant, but these infringed designs don't seem like something you can obviously spot. Samsung, to my knowledge, has nothing to do with the manufacturing or design process of nvidia products.
This isn't the first time something like this has come up, so I find it real suspicious that these companies are able to know about these infringements so easily, if at all.
Of course reverse engineering them things. I would guess that happens a bit.
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The longer we go down this road, the more I fear World War 3 will be fought by throwing patents at eachother.