Posts Tagged: "broadcom"

On March 8, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed decisions by the International Trade Commission (the Commission) and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (the Board or PTAB) both 1) declining to ban Renesas Electronics Corporation and other companies from importing into the United States products alleged to infringe upon Broadcom Corporation’s two patents and 2) finding certain claims of Broadcom’s patents obvious. Broadcom filed a complaint at the Commission alleging a violation of 19 U.S.C. § 1337 (Section 337) based on the importation of products by Renesas and other companies that are asserted to infringe U.S. Patents 7,437,583 and 7,512,752. Broadcom’s ’583 patent is “directed to reducing power consumption in computer systems by ‘gating’ clock signals with circuit elements to turn the signals ON and OFF for downstream parts of the circuit.” The ’752 patent is “directed to a memory access unit that improves upon conventional methods of requesting data located at different addresses within a shared memory.”

On February 4, in a mixed precedential decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed, vacated, and remanded in part a decision by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in a patent infringement suit filed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) against Broadcom Limited, Broadcom Corporation, and Avago Technologies (collectively “Broadcom) and Apple Inc. The suit was related to Caltech’s U.S. Patent 7,116,710 (‘710 patent), U.S. Patent 7,421,032 (‘032 patent), and U.S. Patent 7,916,781 (‘781 patent). The CAFC affirmed the district court’s denial of judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) on infringement because the jury’s verdict of infringement of the declared claims of the ‘710 and ‘032 patents was supported by substantial evidence and the district court’s construction of the claim limitation “repeat” was not erroneous.

On March 13, American semiconductor developer Broadcom Corporation filed a lawsuit in the Central District of California  alleging claims of patent infringement against streaming media producer and provider Netflix, Inc. At a moment in history when streaming services are going to be in higher demand than ever for some time due to social distancing mandates, the complaint marks the first chapter in what could become an interesting legal battle involving dynamic networking and video encoding patent claims. If Netflix is found to infringe, the streaming video giant could ultimately be facing a large verdict. Broadcom is asserting claims from nine U.S. patents and accuses Netflix of directly infringing the patent claims through its Internet video streaming technology and indirectly infringing by inducing end users to infringe through their use of the Netflix software application

This week in Other Barks & Bites: WIPO launches dispute resolution service for Chinese domain names; Morrison Foerster report shows that IP litigation costs are increasing as the number of IP matters being handled are decreasing; the Federal Circuit issues precedential decisions upholding claim construction findings at the ITC and overturning a district court jury verdict finding invalidity for being unsupported by record evidence; the Second Circuit clarifies when profits can be awarded in trademark cases; Uber IP transfer creates $6.1 billion tax break for the company; major football associations call for crackdown on Saudi piracy service; OPPO inks patent agreements with Intel and Ericsson; and Broadcom acquires Symantec’s enterprise security business.

Thursday, September 6th, marks the 24th anniversary of the issue of a seminal patent in the field of MIMO wireless communications. Its inventor, Dr. Arogyaswami Paulraj, is a member of the 2018 class of inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Today, we return to our Evolution of Technology series to explore the story of how this inventor took advantage of his own academic skills to come to the United States and pioneer this major advance in wireless communications.

President Trump’s recently halting Broadcom from a hostile takeover of Qualcomm is good news for American national security. Some have cast the administration’s intervention as “protectionism.”  Those people are ignoring the main point. The president’s order preserving the U.S. firm’s independence acted, as the Wall Street Journal said, on “national-security concerns in this case [that] are legitimate.” … Had Mr. Trump not stopped Broadcom, U.S.-based technology may not set the standards — and level of security — adopted for 5G telecommunications infrastructure. A weakened, dismantled Qualcomm could be overtaken by China’s national champion, Huawei. Congressional concerns over Huawei products’ security and privacy vulnerabilities, as well as the company’s intimacy with the Chinese government, have kept its phones and equipment out of U.S. stores.

Broadcom’s latest bid increases the value of its proposed purchase agreement up from $70 in cash and stock per share up to $82 in cash and stock per share in a deal that would be valued at more than $121 billion. Broadcom’s first takeover bid came last November, originally offering $60 in cash and $10 in Broadcom stock per Qualcomm share. This most recent Broadcom bid retains the $60 in cash per share while increasing the value of Broadcom stock offered up to $22 per share. As a Broadcom press release announcing the increased bid notes, this $82 per share total represents a 50 percent premium over the closing price of Qualcomm shares on November 2nd, 2017, the last trading day unaffected by media speculation of the potential Broadcom buyout.

On Monday, November 6th, Singapore-based semiconductor designer Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) announced that it had offered a proposal to acquire San Diego, CA-based semiconductor rival Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM). The deal values Qualcomm at about $130 billion and Broadcom would pay $70 per share; stockholders would receive $60 in cash and $10 in Broadcom shares in the deal. That $70 per share price was higher than Qualcomm’s per share price on November 6th, when it popped above $65 per share early in the day before declining towards $62 by midday trading. According to Broadcom’s press release on the news, its proposal represents a 28 percent premium over the closing price of Qualcomm stock on Thursday, November 2nd.

Broadcom Ltd. filed a series of six lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California alleging the infringement of a series of patents covering semiconductor technologies. The patent lawsuits target firms making and selling consumer audiovisual products or other articles which utilize system on a chip (SoC) semiconductors and similar processing equipment… Although most of the Broadcom suits assert multiple patents, there is only one patent asserted in each case: U.S. Patent No. 7,310,104, titled Graphics Display System with Anti-Flutter Filtering and Vertical Scaling Feature.

According to multiple reports, the Caltech patents-in-suit are incorporated into both the 802.11n and 802.11ac wireless connectivity standards, which are used by Apple products to communicate digital information. This latest patent infringement lawsuit is part of a growing trend where universities find themselves forced to file suit in U.S. district courts in order to protect their patent rights. They are forced to sue because those that infringe the patents refuse to take licenses on reasonable terms, they refuse to negotiate, and they refuse even to return calls. They choose to infringe with eyes wide open because they feel like they can. This is the face of what is called efficient infringement.

The two largest patent portfolios related to BLE technologies are owned by Irvine, CA-based fabless semiconductor company Broadcom and South Korean electronics giant Samsung. A market map view of the top innovators in the BLE space shows that not only does Broadcom have a slightly larger portfolio than Samsung, it has also dealt with far less litigation than the South Korean developer. The large collection of companies clustering in the lower-left quadrant of this market map represent companies with smaller patent portfolios and lower revenues. The dozens of companies dotting this portion of the map could be an indication that mergers and acquisitions in the IoT semiconductor chip space may be far from over this year.