Patent infringement: Intel must pay 949 million US dollars

Intel is in trouble again because of a patent infringement. The well-known chip manufacturer has to pay a whopping $949 million in damages to the company VLSI Technology.

Intel announces appeal

The court reached a verdict quite quickly in the case about the alleged patent infringement by Intel. After just six days of hearings, it ruled against the chipmaker. Thus, the world-famous chip manufacturer is probably guilty of infringement of a patent in the field of chip technology. However, the plaintiff VLSI Technology will have to wait a little longer for the fine of almost 949 million US dollars. Immediately after the verdict was announced, the company announced that it would appeal. The case focuses on a patent that is supposed to improve the data processing of a chip (patent number: US7247552B2). This had been infringed by Intel’s Skylake and Cascade Lake series CPUs.

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World leader sees itself in the right

While VLSI Technology argues that Intel, through the worldwide distribution of its processors several million times a second, performs a patent infringement, the chip manufacturer considers itself in the right. The company’s patent was in no way used. Instead, the developers at the US company came up with the idea themselves. Apart from that, the patent is already outdated from a modern technical point of view. Intel says in this regard that today’s chip technology would no longer work with the technology submitted by VLSI to the patent office. In this regard, Intel wished for a rethinking of the patent system in the USA in the aftermath of the trial.

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VLSI and Intel are old acquaintances

Incidentally, Intel and VLSI Technology did not sit across from each other for the first time at the court hearing. Rather, the chipmaker has had to pay hefty fines several times in the past as well. This was also the case in March of last year. However, the penalty payment at that time comprised a whopping 2.18 billion US dollars. The amount of the penalty payment makes it clear that the alleged patent infringements are a lucrative income for VLSI Technology. Not without reason one assigns the enterprise meanwhile to the group of so-called patent trolls. They do not earn their money by selling hardware. Instead, they repeatedly sue for patent infringement and enrich themselves from the penalties.