Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has sued Nvidia Corp for infringing several of its chip-related patents and for making false claims about its products. Samsung’s actually counter-suing, after Nvidia filed a suit against the Korean company in September. Samsung, which filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court on Nov. 4, is looking for damages involving deliberate infringement of several technical patents, including a few that govern the way semiconductors buffer and use data.
The eight patents listed by Samsung include chip design patents as well as patents for other technologies such as a method for reducing the booting time for a computer. Moreover Nvidia has also been charged with false advertising regarding its claim according to which the “Shield” tablet has the world’s fastest mobile processor, the Tegra K1. Samsung claims its own Exynos 5433 processor as well as Apple’s A8X are faster. Samsung cites benchmarking studies performed by researchers at Primate Labs for proving this claim to be false.
But in the first place, Nvidia filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm back in September with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court in Delaware. It charged Samsung and Qualcomm of infringing seven of its patents related to GPUs on purpose, and asked the ITC to block shipments of Samsung’s Galaxy phones and tablets that contain Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures. “We’ll review and respond to these new claims against us, and look forward to presenting our case on how Nvidia GPU patents are being used without a license,” Nvidia said in a statement on Tuesday. Nvidia responded to Samsung via their blog.
On the other hand, Nvidia did not expect Samsung to file a lawsuit not only against them, but one of the firm’s small companies, based in Virginia: “It’s unfortunate that Samsung sued Velocity. This isn’t Velocity’s fight. But Samsung is just trying to keep its lawsuit in Virginia, which has a faster time to trial than most jurisdictions in the United States. It can be a dangerous strategy for one of the largest companies on the planet to decide to sue one of the smallest companies in all of Virginia. Samsung’s action does not change our analysis, or our determination. Our patent lawsuit in the ITC is moving forward and remains a far more serious problem for them.”
