Nvidia sued over alleged patent infringement

Invensas Corporation and Tessera Advanced Technologies, both subsidiaries of Xperi Corporation, have announced lawsuits against Nvidia for alleged violation of five patents relating to semiconductor technologies - and the companies' histories suggest they could walk away with a hefty settlement.

A well-known patent assertion entity (PAE), Xperi's subsidiaries have been behind patent infringement suits against some of technologies' biggest names. The company has successfully settled cases against AMD, Samsung, and Broadcom, and is now targeting Nvidia with claims the company is infringing on five patents held by subsidiary companies Invensas and Tessera Advanced Technologies.

A statement made by Xperi chief executive Jon Kirchner during the company's first quarter earnings call, first spotted by Tom's Hardware, confirms the details of the case. 'Today we filed a lawsuit against Nvidia for patent infringement. We believe that Nvidia is using our patent semiconductor technology in certain of its CPUs and processors and we have been speaking with NVIDIA for several years about taking a patent licence,' claims Kirchner. 'We ultimately could not reach an agreement and we felt that we needed to take this action to defend our intellectual property rights. We filed the case in Delaware Federal Court asserting five patents. We think it’s broadly applicable to [Nvidia's] core GPU and processor offerings, and it's our preference to see a resolution to this, but after working diligently for an extended period of time we felt it was necessary to take this step to help try to close the gap essentially on our respective views.'

The patents in question include a method of forming an interconnect for planar semiconductors, a reference voltage circuit with claimed zero temperature coefficient, a packaging method for semiconductors, and 'a semiconductor apparatus that allows miniaturisation of a multichip module using an imposer substrate and a method of manufacturing the same'.

Nvidia has not yet responded to the company's accusations.