Though Nvidia is seeking a court order to halt shipments of Galaxy mobile devices, a Samsung official has brushed aside questions about the lawsuit alleging the devices infringed on patents held by the graphics hardware developer.
Nvidia says Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali and Imagination's PowerVR graphics processing units infringe on nearly two decades worth of research and development. Nvidia is filing suit to stop the shipment of devices containing the graphics processing units in question, but a Samsung official recently indicated that his company didn't view Nvidia's claims as a threat.
"Though we need to review the legal details more thoroughly, we do not think the lawsuit will pose a serious and immediate threat to sales of our new smartphones," said the Samsung official. "It is not a case new to the company, and we hadn't suffered from serious problems regarding our new products in the past."
Nvidia says Samsung has been incorrectly placing the blame on the hardware manufacturers. Nvidia says it revealed its patents to Samsung as part of negotiations for licensing terms.
"With Samsung, Nvidia's licensing team negotiated directly with Samsung on a patent portfolio license," stated a Nvidia official in a blog post. "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."
As Samsung prepares to release its latest round of products, another company official indicated that Nividia's claims only speak to the mobile device manufacturer's advancing innovations.
"Cases like this continue to happen as graphic technologies have become more important in smart mobile devices," the official said. "From a different point of view, this can be seen as another proof of the company's success in the global market."
Nvidia points to seven of its 7,000 patents as having been infringed on by Samsung, Qualcomm and others:
"Transform, lighting and rasterization system embodied on a single semiconductor platform," "Single semiconductor graphics platform system and method with skinning, swizzling and masking capabilities," "Programmable graphics processor for multithreaded execution of programs," "Method and apparatus for multithreaded processing of data in a programmable graphics processor," "Rendering pipeline," "System, method and article of manufacture for a programmable vertex processing model with instruction set" and "System, method and article of manufacture for shadow mapping."
"Those patents include our foundational invention, the GPU, which puts onto a single chip all the functions necessary to process graphics and light up screens," said the Nividia official in the blog post.
Nvidia filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., against Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm on Sept. 4, where it states the companies have infringed on seven of its patents related to graphic processing unit (GPU) technology. It wants Samsung and Qualcomm to stop selling Galaxy smartphones and tablets that use either Samsung Electronics' Exynos or Qualcomm's Snapdragron processors in the U.S. market.
