Two subsidiaries of semiconductor manufacturing company Xperi, Invensas Corporation and Tessera Advanced Technologies, have filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA for allegedly violating five of their patents. They involve semiconductor technologies used in certain CPUs and processors.
CEO Jon Kirchner says Xperi spoke to NVIDIA for several years about taking a patent license. Evidently, that didn’t work.
Xperi had sued both Samsung and Broadcom over three of these same patents in the past and won, forcing them to take multi-year patent licensing agreements. NVIDIA may be fated to do the same.
We tracked down the company’s filing in the U.S. Delaware Court, but proposed damages and/or royalty demands aren’t listed yet. Compared to Nvidia with its ~$102.7 billion market cap, Xperi is a rather small company with a cap of ~$1.2 billion. But given the company’s successful defense of several of these patents against industry behemoths Samsung and Broadcom, the validity of the patents will be hard to challenge, meaning the case will likely boil down to if Xperi can prove Nvidia is using the patented IP.