Graphics hardware producer Nvidia has just had a major setback in pursuit of sticking a pair of lawsuits against Samsung and Qualcomm on Friday, Oct. 9, but it is not giving up.
The setback came when U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) Judge Thomas Pender ruled that the defendants had not violated two of the three patents Nvidia claimed were stepped on. The third, the judge ruled, was violated but wasn't unique enough to warrant damages.
Had Nvidia been successful with the ITC suit, Qualcomm and Samsung would have been prevented from importing into the United States the products leveraging the tech deemed to have benefited from private meetings.
Last year, Nvidia stated that it met with Samsung to discuss patent licenses and it showed the handset maker tech that was later used by Samsung without securing Nvidia's permission. The graphics processing technology was later employed in Samsung's Exynos processors and Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, Nvidia asserts.
Judge Pender's ruling has, for now, cleared the Samsung and Qualcomm products that included the chips, particularly the Adreno, PowerVR and Mali GPUs.
Nvidia has also filed a suit against Samsung and Qualcomm in the federal court of Wilmington, Delaware. But it isn't done with its efforts with the ITC.
"We now intend to ask the full commission (which is made up of six commissioners) to review this initial determination and to confirm the previous judgment of the U.S. Patent Office - that the third patent is valid," says NVidia in a blog post. "If they agree, the ITC would issue an order that would preclude Samsung from importing into the U.S. infringing Samsung mobile devices and smart TVs."
Samsung has been declining to respond to new requests to comment on the matter, but it offered its opinion on the suit last fall.
"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," a Samsung official stated last September. "It is not a case new to the company, and we hadn't suffered from serious problems regarding our new products in the past."
