By David Manners, ElectronicsWeekly (March 3, 2021)
VLSI Technology, which was bought by Philips Semiconductors (now NXP) in 1999 for $1 billion, has successfully sued Intel for patent infringement in a court in Waco, Texas and been awarded $2.18 billion damages.
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.