America; the land of the free, Mom’s freshly baked apple pie, and the constant looming threat of a lawsuit.
Californian firm MicroUnity can certainly call itself a patriot after whipping up an impressive whirlwind of litigation that takes in a rather extensive list of companies, after filing a recent lawsuit at the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Marshall Division.
The patent infringement lawsuit, filed on January 27 2010, concerns a patent titled ‘Programmable processor with group floating point operations’ and has been targeted at the following firms:
Apple, AT&T, AT&T Mobility, Cellco Partnership, Exedea, Google, HTC in China and America, LG in Korea and America, Mobilecomm, Motorola, Nokia in Finland and America, Palm, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Samsung Semiconductor, Samsung Telecommunications, Sprint Spectrum and Texas Instruments.
The lawsuit refers to the infringement on the patent, referred to as the ‘765 patent, issued to MicroUnity on November 4 2003.
MicroUnity has called for damages and lawyer’s fees in addition to an injunction on the defendant firms further utilising what MicroUnity deems to be copyrighted under the terms of its patent.
This effectively refers to the certain processors used by firms such as Samsung and SSI's S5PC100 and S5PC110 processors, Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors, Apple's A4 processors, and others.
It also refers to mobile phones, media player devices and tablets including the Motorola Droid, DroidX, Droid 2, Droid Pro, Bravo, Flipout, Charm and DeS; Nokia N900; Palm Pre and Pre Plus: Samsung, Tab, Continuum, Epic 4G and Focus; HTC Droid Incredible, Evo 4G and Surround; Google/ HTC Nexus One; Google/Samsung Nexus S; and Apple iPhone 3GS and 4, iPod Touch 3 and 4G, iPad, and Apple TV (2"" gen), as well as many others.
The patent refers specifically to an invention which provides a system and method for improving the performance of general purpose processors by expanding at least one source operand to “a width greater than the width of either the general purpose register or the data path width”.
“In addition, several classes of instructions will be provided which cannot be performed efficiently if the operands are limited to the width and accessible number of general purpose registers. “
Read here for more details of the patent.