Broadcom should pay $8.3 million, he says
By Kathryn Balint
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
January 17, 2007
Qualcomm ended its side of its patent-infringement case against rival Broadcom yesterday with an expert witness who testified that Broadcom should pay nearly $8.3 million in royalties if, in fact, the Irvine-based semiconductor company has infringed on Qualcomm's patents.
The fifth day of the jury trial before U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster also brought the first witnesses in Broadcom's defense.
San Diego-based Qualcomm filed suit against Broadcom in October 2005, claiming that Broadcom had infringed on two of Qualcomm's patents for technology used to compress digital video so that it can be easily transmitted over cable, wirelessly or by satellite. Of the two patents at issue, one of them, which describes a method for video encoding and decoding, is of particular interest in the trial because Qualcomm contends that the technology is incorporated into a key industry standard that is used in chips that power tens of millions of consumer electronic devices.
Broadcom's chips for TV set-top boxes, high-definition DVD players and Apple video iPods meet that industry standard, and therefore Qualcomm says they infringe on its patented video encoding and decoding technology.
Broadcom says that the industry standard for video compression and Qualcomm's patented technology are not the same at all.
Brian Napper, an intellectual property expert with FTI Consulting's San Francisco office, testified on behalf of Qualcomm that the wireless company deserves almost $8.3 million in royalties from Broadcom for use of the one patent from October 2005, when the lawsuit was filed, until early this month.
He said the patent has “intrinsically more value” than the other one in question in the lawsuit. He said Qualcomm's attorneys did not ask him to calculate the worth of the other patent that Qualcomm says Broadcom infringed.
On cross examination by a Broadcom attorney, Napper said he assumed that Broadcom had infringed on Qualcomm's patent, and if no infringement had occurred, then his calculation would be moot.
Broadcom began its defense yesterday with four witnesses, including Henry Samueli, Broadcom's co-founder, chief technical officer and chairman of the board. Like Qualcomm co-founder and chairman Irwin Jacobs, Samueli had been a professor before starting his company.
In the early days, Qualcomm focused on wireless technology for cell phones and Broadcom focused on high-speed communications technology. The two companies were friendly and even were partners on a Bluetooth wireless technology effort – until Broadcom announced its intention to compete directly with Qualcomm by making chips for cell phones.
Broadcom ended the day in federal court with the introduction of Kannan Ramchandran, a University of California-Berkeley professor and video-compression expert, who is expected today to contradict Qualcomm's witness Iain Richardson.
Richardson, an associate professor at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, testified last week that the industry standard and Qualcomm's patented technology used the same method of video compression.
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