Intel was ordered to pay $ 2.18 billion after losing a two-decade patent lawsuit, Bloomberg reported. A jury found that Intel infringed patents related to clock frequencies and voltage owned by a company called VLSI LLC. “Intel strongly disagrees with today’s jury verdict,” said the company Bloomberg in a statement. “We intend to appeal and we are confident that we will win.”
“We are delighted that the jury recognized the value of the innovations reflected in the patents and we are extremely happy with the jury’s verdict,” said VLSI Chief Executive Michael Stolarski in a statement. Patents, which date from 2010 and 2012, have changed hands several times over the years. They were originally awarded to FreeScale Semiconductor and SigmaTel, but FreeScale later bought SigmaTel and ended up being swallowed up by NXP Semiconductors in 2015.
VLSI was a legitimate semiconductor company founded in 1979 and one of ARM Ltd.’s original investment partners. It was bought by Philips in 1999 for $ 1 billion and parts of it survive today within the Philips NXP spin-off. Separately, VLSI LLC started again four years ago and took back control of the two patents. However, Intel attorney William Lee argued that the company has no products and that its only potential source of revenue is the lawsuit. “VLSI]took two patents that hadn’t been used in 10 years off the shelf and said, ‘We want $ 2 billion,'” Lee told the jury.
The case was disputed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas under Judge Alan Albright. Albright is “a former patent litigator and magistrate who took an oath as a federal judge in 2018 and quickly made his court one of the most popular for patent owners to file a lawsuit”, Bloomberg noticed.