In what appears to be the second-largest payment ever over technology patents, Marvell Technology has agreed to pay Carnegie Mellon University $750 million to end a patent infringement case.

After a massive win at the district court level, CMU was on track to collect as much as $1.54 billion. The university won a $1.17 billion jury verdict in 2012, to which a judge added penalties and interest. But an appeals court cut the win significantly, approving $278 million in damages and ordering other damages issues to be re-tried at the district court level.

Rather than further litigate the case, the two sides reached the deal for the $750 million payment, which was announced late yesterday.

CMU said in a statement that a "substantial share" of the proceeds will go to the two named inventors on the patents, José Moura and Aleksandar Kavcic. Moura is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Kavcic is a former doctoral student of his, now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Hawaii.

"Their scientific research and technological innovations had a powerful impact on the ability to detect more accurately the data stored in the disk drives of computers sold worldwide in the last decade and a half, from large servers to small laptops," the university said.

In the university's account, the duo created a solution to the problem of increasing "noise" as data storage grew exponentially. They created "a new read channel detector that accounts for noise associated with each particular pattern of bits recorded," which was "widely recognized by the industry."

"When the industry faced the inevitability of its own success, it needed a fundamentally new approach," Moura said. "Our solution could read back, with few errors, the enormous amount of data industry was packing in very small spaces. The rest is history."

In an email to alumni, CMU president Subra Suresh said that after legal expenses and the inventors' share are paid, the university will get approximately $250 million.

"There is broad consensus across the university that we should dedicate a substantial majority of this resource to helping qualified students afford a Carnegie Mellon education, helping all students succeed while they are here, and enriching the student experience," wrote Suresh.

At trial, CMU argued that Marvell had infringed two patents, numbered 6,201,839 and 6,438,180. The patents deal with the problem of reducing "noise" on hard disks. At trial and on appeal, Marvell argued to no avail that an earlier Seagate patent describes everything in CMU's invention.

The settlement didn't seem to affect the stock price of Marvell, which had $2.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the beginning of 2015.

The $750 million payment is the largest payment ever for a patent case involving a computer science invention. The biggest award in a non-medical technology patent case is Polaroid's case against Kodak over instant cameras, which resulted in a $909 million verdict in 1990 and a $925 million settlement the following year. That case also led to an injunction shutting down Kodak's instant camera business.

Other similarly massive payouts in tech patent cases include Blackberry (then Research in Motion) paying $612.5 million to patent-holding company NTP in 2006 when it was facing an injunction. In December 2015, Samsung was compelled to pay $548 million as part of the blockbuster Apple v. Samsung cases, and the company ultimately could have to pay more.

Some medical and pharmaceutical patent cases have resulted in even bigger larger payouts. In 2013, Sun Pharmaceuticals and Teva agreed to pay $2.15 billion to resolve a patent lawsuit over Pfizer's Protonix acid-reflux drug. In 2014, Medtronic agreed to pay Edwards Lifesciences at least $1.1 billion in a case involving heart valves. Medtronic was the payor in another massive settlement in 2005, when the company agreed to pay $1.35 billion to a surgeon and his company who sued over spinal surgery patents.