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The penalty for the infringement of one patent was assessed at $1.5 billion and the other was assessed at $675 million.
Intel’s lawyer, William Lee, said that VLSI “took two patents off the shelf that hadn’t been used for 10 years and said: ‘We’d like $2 billion’.”
One of the patents was issued in 2010 to SigmaTel which had been bought, in 2008, by Freescale and the other was issued in 2012 to Freescale which was bought by NXP in 2015.
Both patents were transferred to VLSI in 2019.
It is unclear what the current status of VLSI is. Lee said it was formed four years ago and had no products of its own. He acknowledged that NXP would share in the distribution of the award.
Back in 1990, VLSI, then a notable ASIC supplier, joined with Apple and Acorn to found Arm.
The judge in the case, Alan Albright, is a former patent litigator who became a judge in 2018 and has become a favourite for litigants asserting patents.
That’s the way the Courts are in Texas.
VLSI could have been itching for some payback for Intel destroying its chipset business.
According to a former VLSI engineer I worked with for a few years, Intel couldn’t compete directly against VLSI chipsets, but they had memories and CPUs. Intel bundled their chipsets with those, which wiped out VLSI market share. Can they do that? Probably not now, but back then it was more Wild West.