Another player enters the patent wars and its setting its sights on Samsung and Qualcomm.
NVIDIA filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the International Trade Commission (ITC) and the U.S. District Court of Delaware, accusing both companies of infringing upon seven of its graphics processing unit (GPU) patents. If the ITC decides to investigate the issue, NVIDIA's lawsuit in Wilmington, Delaware will be put on hold.
NVIDIA says it is seeking to ban several Samsung devices powered by Qualcomm's Adreno GPU series and Samsung's own Exynos mobile processors, which run on ARM's Mali and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPUs and are used in Samsung devices sold in its home country Korea. The ban involves a huge number of Samsung devices in its Galaxy line, including the newly unveiled Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note Edge, as well as the flagship Galaxy S5, S4 and S3 smartphones, which are all running on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors with Adreno graphics cores.
Specifically, NVIDIA is seeking damages for patents for seven technologies, including the use of a GPU, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing. Unified shaders allow every processing unit in a GPU to be used for several different purposes, while multithreads allows processing to occur in different threads while using the same resources. NVIDIA is also accusing Samsung and Qualcomm of infringing upon its patent for programmable shading, which allows users to program sophisticated graphics without having to be experts.
In a blog post, NVIDIA chief administrative officer David Shannon says it has been in several unproductive meetings with Samsung to negotiate a license fee for using its GPU technology since 2012, but laments that Samsung "repeatedly said that this was mostly their suppliers' problem."
"Without licensing NVIDIA's patented GPU technology, Samsung and Qualcomm have chosen to deploy our IP without proper compensation to us," says Shannon. "This is inconsistent with our strategy to earn an appropriate return on our investment."
NVIDIA's GPUs are extremely complex processors that contain more than seven billion transistors and require more than a thousand engineering-years to create. They are fundamental in the rise of mobile computing and are becoming even more important as users shift from using their smartphones for calling and texting to more graphics-heavy uses such as playing games and watching videos.
However, NVIDIA has failed to match up to its competition Qualcomm, which owns a significant portion of the market share. Several of the world's most important smartphones, including the Sony Xperia Z3, HTC One, LG G3, OnePlus One, Amazon Fire Phone, Nokia Lumia 930 and Google's Nexus 5, all run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors incorporating the Adreno GPUs that NVIDIA wants out of the U.S. market.
This is part of NVIDIA's renewed efforts to license its GPU technology in the mobile industry, a strategy that the company announced to its shareholders last year. In 2011, NVIDIA was again involved in a patent battle with PC chipmaker Intel, which was ordered by the court to make annual license payments worth more than $250 million to NVIDIA.
Samsung and Qualcomm, which are no strangers to the patent wars, declined to comment.
