The United States International Trade Commission has stated on Tuesday, that it will be investigating the complaint filed by Samsung against Nvidia, which accuse Nvidia for infringement of some of Samsung’s patents covering graphics chip technology. Samsung has filed the complaint in November as a response to an earlier ruling passed by the same court to investigate a patent infringement complaint by Nvidia against Samsung.
David Shannon, chief administrative officer at Nvidia, said in a statement on the company’s website, “This is typical legal ping pong,”.
Earlier this year, Nvidia had sued Samsung and Qualcomm against an alleged infringement involving seven patents related graphics chips such as unified shading, programmable shading, multithreaded processing on GPU, and the idea behind a standalone GPU, among others. Samsung is also working on its in-house mobile GPU design, which will be integrated in Exynos SoC for mobile devices.
The complaints filed by both the companies is an after-effect of suing each other in federal district courts in Delaware and Virginia. In recent years, companies in the IT industry are increasingly locking horns over alleged infringements and patents.
Cases covering such issues are decided in district courts, but ITC is a famous avenue for filing second complaint because cases move faster than other courts and, ITC also holds power to halt imports of the infringing products into the U.S. It can cause a much greater instant impact than civil court cases, which consume more time.
ITC also has power to reject or investigate the allegations. The ITC’s decision to investigate in both the cases does not indicate the merits of either company’s complaint.
David Shannon said,“Nvidia remains focused on ensuring that we receive fair compensation from Samsung for using our technology in Galaxy phones and tablets,” he said.
Besides Nvidia, Samsung’s law suit also involves companies like EVGA, Fuhu, Jaton, Mad Catz, Biostar Microtech, Elitegroup Computer Systems, Ouya, Sparkle Computer, Toradex, Wikipad and ZOTAC, as they sell products integrated with Nvidia technology.
