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Lexra takes steps to end MIPS legal battle
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
December 11, 2000 (1:32 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001211S0047
SAN MATEO, Calif. — MIPS Technologies Inc.'s patent infringement suit against core vendor Lexra Inc. has taken another turn, with Lexra asking a judge to rule in its favor and separately asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine one of the two MIPS patents Lexra is alleged to violate. Lexra filed a motion for a summary judgement in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, before U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong. Charlie Cheng, Lexra's president and chief executive officer, said that if the company's requests are granted, he hopes the case will be quickly resolved. Cheng said the company also wants the patent office to take another look at MIPS patent No. 4,814,976, which deals with unaligned loads and stores. Lexra claims that IBM Corp. patent No. 3,916,388, titled "Shifting Apparatus for Automatic Data Alignment," predates the MIPS claim by nearly 20 years, and as such MIPS has no real claim to enforce its patent against Lexra. MIPS Technologies sued Lexra last October charging it with patent infringement. "We are very excited about these moves and are confident the courts and patent office will rule in our favor," said Cheng. "The statistics on patent reexamination [show] that almost 50 percent of all reexaminations result in invalidation or reinterpretation." Cheng would not state whether the company is seeking to have the second disputed MIPS patent, No. 5,864,703, reexamined by the Patent and Trademark Office. It describes overflow of registers used mainly in DSP operations.