A federal jury in Texas this week ordered Intel to pay VLSI Technology nearly $949 million for infringing a patent with its processors, according to a Reuters report. Intel disagreed with the verdict and will appeal.
VLSI asserts that Intel's Skylake and Cascade Lake processors violated its patents covering a CPU innovation and its lawyers say that the violations cause 'millions and millions of infringements per second.' Intel argues that its Skylake and Cascade Lake CPUs use technologies developed in-house and that the patent VLSI acquired from NXP cannot cover modern processors.
Based on court records accessed via PACER, VLSI is accusing Intel of infringing its 7,242,552 patent, which covers a method for lessening the problems of defects caused by stress applied to bond pads. The technique includes adding dummy metal lines to interconnect layers to increase their density before producing other layers.
This is not the first time Intel has lost in court to VLSI. In March 2021, a district judge in Waco, Texas, ordered Intel to pay VLSI $2.18 billion for infringing two of its patents related to frequency management and lowering memory voltage. The patents were originally filed by SigmaTel and Freescale. Intel failed to overturn the ruling in Aug. 2021.
Intel and VLSI have a large scale ongoing legal battle in different courts across the U.S. and abroad. VLSI accused Intel of infringing 19 of its patents that originate from Freescale, SigmaTel, and NXP. Some of the claims have been dismissed by judges, but many cases are still ongoing.
VLSI is controlled by Fortress Investment Group, a private equity firm, which is owned by SoftBank. SoftBank also owns Arm. Intel and Apple have accused VLSI, Fortress, and their affiliates of unlawful patent aggregation.
