As patent wars wage on, Samsung Electronics has asked the International Trade Commission (ITC) to ban California-based Nvidia Corp's computer graphics and mobile chips in the U.S.
Samsung filed the complaint with the U.S. ITC on Friday Nov. 21, requesting it to halt the sale of Nvidia's GeForce graphic processing unit (GPUs) and Tegra system on chips (SoCs) as they infringed the South Korean company's patents.
Earlier in September, Nvidia had filed a patent violation complaint against Samsung, requesting the ITC to ban Samsung's Galaxy phones that included the supposed infringed chips.
"We are asking the ITC to block shipments of Samsung Galaxy mobile phones and tablets containing Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali or Imagination's PowerVR graphics architectures. We are also asking the Delaware court to award damages to us for the infringement of our patents," disclosed Nvidia in a blog post at the time.
Samsung's complaint to ITC is seen as counter attack and labeled "predictable tactic" by Nvidia. Earlier on Nov. 4, Samsung filed a counter lawsuit against Nvidia at a federal court seeking damages for "deliberate infringement."
According to Samsung's petition, under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (which pertains to SoCs and GPUs) the ITC has been requested to conduct a thorough examination of the alleged infringement by Nvidia. Majority of Nvidia's GPUs are deployed in PCs rather than tablets or mobile phones or tablets. It is also used in Shield Portable Android devices, HTC's Nexus 9 and Nvidia's Shield Tablet.
In the event, the ITC established that Nvidia's chips indeed infringe the patents, then it is in a position to ban the sales of these products in the U.S.
However, usually, such appeals take several years to be investigated and a majority of the violating products do not end up getting banned.
The two companies continue to remain at loggerheads and deny violating each other's patents.
"We have not seen the complaint so can't comment, but we look forward to pursuing our earlier filed ITC action against Samsung products," said Nvidia's spokesperson Hector Marinez, to Bloomberg an e-mailed statement.
