Nvidia has launched a patent lawsuit against Samsung and Quallcom, claiming that the company has unlawfully emulated its graphics architecture.
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In a blog post, Nvidia’s David Shannon writes: “This is an important day for NVIDIA. For the first time since starting this company 21 years ago, we have initiated a patent lawsuit.
“This afternoon, we filed patent infringement complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm with both the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and the U.S. District Court, in Delaware.”
The post continues: “We are asking the ITC to block shipments of Samsung Galaxy mobile phones and tablets containing Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures. We are also asking the Delaware court to award damages to us for the infringement of our patents.
“We have spent more than $9 billion in R&D since 1993 when we began to build the best GPUs and the richest patent portfolio of graphics IP in the world.
“Our IP strategy is to earn an appropriate return on our investment by licensing our graphics cores and by licensing our patents. In each case, we start with a negotiation.
“With Samsung, NVIDIA’s licensing team negotiated directly with Samsung on a patent portfolio license. We had several meetings where we demonstrated how our patents apply to all of their mobile devices and to all the graphics architectures they use.
“We made no progress. Samsung repeatedly said that this was mostly their suppliers’ problem.”
Shannon goes on to state that Nvidia is accusing Samsung of infringing upon seven of its patents, including its “foundational invention” the GPU. It’s questionable that Nvidia has targeted Samsung, which doesn’t manufacture the technology which Nvidia claims infringes upon its IP but rather integrates it into its hardware, but it’s likely that this is a case of those companies having the most money out of Nvidia’s potential targets for this lawsuit.
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According to AnandTech, Nvidia will consider pursuing further legal action against the likes of suppliers such as ARM and Imagination depending upon how well this court case goes for them, though no further legal action has been confirmed by the company.
Shannon added: “Without licensing NVIDIA’s patented GPU technology, Samsung and Qualcomm have chosen to deploy our IP without proper compensation to us. This is inconsistent with our strategy to earn an appropriate return on our investment.
“We are now seeking the courts’ judgment to confirm the validity, infringement and value of our patents so that we can reach agreement with Samsung and its graphics suppliers.”
Below is the list of patent infringements filed by Nvidia:
- US Patent No. 6,198,488, “Transform, lighting and rasterization system embodied on a single semiconductor platform”
- US Patent No. 6,992,667, “Single semiconductor graphics platform system and method with skinning, swizzling and masking capabilities”
- US Patent No. 7,038,685, “Programmable graphics processor for multithreaded execution of programs”
- US Patent No. 7,015,913, “Method and apparatus for multithreaded processing of data in a programmable graphics processor”
- US Patent No. 6,697,063, “Rendering pipeline”
- US Patent No. 7,209,140, “System, method and article of manufacture for a programmable vertex processing model with instruction set”
- US Patent No. 6,690,372, “System, method and article of manufacture for shadow mapping”
The CTO of Oculus, the company behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and Samsung’s partners in the creation of the Samsung Gear VR headset, succinctly summarized his thoughts on the lawsuit on Twitter, writing: “WTF Nvidia?”
