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.





