For the first time in its history, NVIDIA has failed a patent infringement lawsuit.
In a post on the company's website, NVIDIA explained that it understands the significance of this action, but it had to protect its investments by filing patent infringement complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm with both the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and the U.S. District Court, in Delaware.
In the filing, NVIDIA claims that it has approached Samsung repeatedly and demonstrated to them how their devices infringe on its patents. However, Samsung refused to cooperated and insisted that this was mostly their suppliers’ problem.
NVIDIA noted that it has more than 7,000 patents in its portfolio. However, it has chosen only 7 of them to assert in its lawsuit.
Those patents include our foundational invention, the GPU, which puts onto a single chip all the functions necessary to process graphics and light up screens; our invention of programmable shading, which allows non-experts to program sophisticated graphics; our invention of unified shaders, which allow every processing unit in the GPU to be used for different purposes; and our invention of multithreaded parallel processing in GPUs, which enables processing to occur concurrently on separate threads while accessing the same memory and other resources."
NVIDIA is seeking the courts’ judgment to confirm the validity, infringement and value of our patents so that it can reach agreement with Samsung and its graphics suppliers.
