In its ongoing battle against VLSI, the now-defunct manufacturer of specialized integrated circuits, Intel must pay a huge fine for infringing a patent issued nearly two decades ago. A federal jury in Texas has once again ruled in favor of VLSI, a dormant company owned by the private equity firm Fortress Investment Group, and ordered Intel to pay $949 million. The Santa Clara corporation, in turn, is not interested in paying for a technology that is allegedly not used in its current processors.

The patent in question was acquired by VLSI from Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV and, according to the plaintiff, affects “millions and millions of violations per second” in Intel processors. The jury was convinced and VLSI was awarded the full amount of damages.

Patent US7247552B2 covers a “method of eliminating problems associated with defects caused by stress applied to bonding pads.” The patented technology improves the design of the microcircuit by adding dummy metal lines in the layers of connections to increase the density of the metal in them.

According to VLSI, Intel used the patent in the architecture of Skylake and Cascade Lake processors released in 2015 and 2019.

According to Intel, the disputed technology is not used in its processors at all; Skylake and Cascade Lake use proprietary technology, Intel said in court, and the VLSI patent won’t work at all with modern processors. Needless to say, the chip maker is not happy with the verdict and will appeal.

The $949 million fine is yet another episode in the legal war between Intel and VLSI, with the latter existing and operating only as a patent troll bent on squeezing all the money out of proprietary technology. In March, a jury in Texas ordered Intel to pay VLSI more than $2 billion, and in April, another trial ended in Intel’s favor, alleging patent infringement for $3 billion.

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Source: TechSpot