Nvidia files a patent lawsuit against Samsung and Qualcomm

Nvidia filed patent infringement lawsuits in Delaware against Samsung and Qualcomm concerning graphics processor technologies which Nvidia claims those companies have used in their products without license.

The graphics chip maker also asked the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) "to block shipments of Samsung Galaxy mobile phones and tablets containing Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali, or Imagination's PowerVR graphics architectures."

Nvidia's Tegra mobile processors with GPU functionality compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Samsung's Exynos chips.

Among the products Nvidia wants blocked are Samsung's Galaxy Note Edge,Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3, and Galaxy S4 smartphones, as well as the Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy NotePRO, and Galaxy Tab 2 tablets.

Nvidia said the seven patents it is claiming Qualcomm and Samsung have infringed concern GPU technologies like programmable shading, unified shaders, and multithreaded parallel processing.

The lawsuits are the first patent infringement complaints Nvidia has made in its 21-year history, the company.

"As the world leader in visual computing, Nvidia has invented technologies that are vital to mobile computing. We have the richest portfolio of computer graphics IP in the world, with 7,000 patents granted and pending, produced by the industry's best graphics engineers and backed by more than $9 billion in R&D," Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in a statement.

"Our patented GPU inventions provide significant value to mobile devices. Samsung and Qualcomm have chosen to use these in their products without a license from us. We are asking the courts to determine infringement of Nvidia's GPU patents by all graphics architectures used in Samsung's mobile products and to establish their licensing value."

Samsung told PCMag it had no comment on the matter. A Qualcomm spokesperson said the company was "aware of the complaints and [we] are evaluating them."

At issue for Nvidia are Qualcomm's proprietary Adreno GPU cores used in the Snapdragon processors, which power many of Samsung's mobile devices, as well as ARM's Mali GPUs and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPUs, which are used in Samsung's own Exynos mobile chips.

Nvidia claimed that it reached a dead end in negotiations with Samsung on negotiations to license its IP for use in Samsung's devices.

"With Samsung, Nvidia's licensing team negotiated directly with Samsung on a patent portfolio license," Nvidia's David Shannon said. "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."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2467372,00.asp