"Broadcom witness Kannan Ramchandran also said that he believed the two Qualcomm patents are invalid."
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Witness rebuts patent claims by Qualcomm
By Kathryn Balint
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
January 18, 2007
A University of California Berkeley professor testified yesterday that chips made by Broadcom for the Apple video iPod, high-definition DVD players and other consumer electronic devices do not infringe on two Qualcomm patents that are the center of an ongoing San Diego federal court trial.
Broadcom witness Kannan Ramchandran also said that he believed the two Qualcomm patents are invalid.
San Diego wireless technology giant Qualcomm has accused rival Broadcom, a semiconductor company based in Irvine, of using two Qualcomm video-compression patents without permission and without paying licensing fees or royalties. Qualcomm has asked for $8.3 million in damages for use of one of the patented technologies.
At the heart of the jury trial is whether that particular patented technology is incorporated into an industry standard for video compression known as H.264. Broadcom makes several chips that comply with the H.264 standard and which are used in such devices as the Apple video iPod, high-definition DVD players and TV cable and satellite set-top boxes.
If, in fact, the H.264 standard does use Qualcomm's patented technology, as Qualcomm contends, then that means that other manufacturers besides Broadcom might also be infringing on the Qualcomm patent.
Ramchandran, who received about $300,000 in research funding from Qualcomm from 2002 to 2005 and has former students working at both Qualcomm and Broadcom, contradicted testimony from Qualcomm witness Iain Richardson, an associate professor at Robert Gordon University in Scotland.
Richardson, who wrote a book about the H.264 standard, said that the video decoding and encoding technology invented by Qualcomm employee Chong Lee in 1989 and later patented by Qualcomm is the same method of video compression used in the H.264 standard. Therefore, he said, Broadcom chips that conform to the standard infringe on Qualcomm's patent.
However, Ramchandran, whose work was cited in Richardson's book, testified yesterday that there are “fundamental” and “substantial” differences between the video compression processes described in Qualcomm's patent and those that are in the H.264 standard used in Broadcom's chips.
For one of the processes, known as transform, he listed four differences that he said were fundamentally different than the transform used in the H.264 standard.
In his testimony last week, Richardson had testified that the two types of transforms were the same – that the transform used in the H.264 was just another form of the transform described in the Qualcomm patent.
Ramchandran, however, pointed to a section of Richardson's book where Richardson compared the two types of transforms and wrote that there were “fundamental differences” between the two. Ramchandran said some of the differences he was describing were the same as what Richardson had outlined in his book.
Under cross-examination, James Batchelder, Qualcomm's lead attorney in the case, asked Ramchandran if he had agreed to testify for Broadcom because he was unhappy that Qualcomm stopped funding his research in 2005. Ramchandran denied that was the case and said most research funding he receives lasts only three years.
Batchelder asked Ramchandran a series of questions intended to show that Richardson was more knowledgeable about the issues at hand and had done a more thorough investigation for the case.
For instance, under questioning by Batchelder, Ramchandran said he had not published a paper on the H.264 standard nor had he read the standard before he was asked to testify in the case. Ramchandran did say that he had been aware of the concepts of the standard since its conception in 2001.
Broadcom is expected to wrap up its defense today – the seventh day of the case – to be followed by Qualcomm's rebuttal witnesses. The case will resume Wednesday. It is expected to go to the jury late next week.
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