OPTi Says SIS, Via Infringe 'Presnoop' Tech Patent
By Derek Hawkins
Law360, New York (August 02, 2010) -- OPTi Inc. has slapped Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. and Via Technologies Inc. with a lawsuit accusing them of infringing a pair of patents related to predictive snooping technology.
The California-based chipset manufacturer filed the suit Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, claiming SIS and Via infringed its “presnoop patents” through their sale of logic chipsets, motherboards, microcomputers and other products that use the technology.
OPTi further claims that SIS and Via induced third-party manufacturers to make and sell products whose operations infringe the presnoop patents and says the alleged infringements were willful and deliberate.
OPTi lists SIS’ SiS964 Southbridge and VIA’s VT8237A Southbridge among the products that allegedly infringed the patents, U.S. Patent Numbers 5,710,906 and 6,405,291.
The company seeks triple damages for willful patent infringement, a permanent injunction and attorneys’ fees, according to the complaint.
An attorney for OPTi did not return a call for comment, and counsel for the defendants could not immediately be identified Monday.
The two patents-in-suit, titled “Predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses,” deal with means of transferring information more efficiently among a computer’s bus master, memory and other internal devices.
The suit follows a Texas jury's verdict in April 2009 awarding OPTi $19 million in its suit accusing Apple Inc. of willfully infringing its presnoop patents.
OPTi unsuccessfully sought $12 million in additional damages, arguing that Apple had made billions of dollars in profits in its sale of the allegedly infringing products, which included desktops, portable computers and servers that used the snooping technology.
In May, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. struck a settlement in a similar OPTi suit that accused several companies of infringing a patent related to computer chipset technology.
OPTi brought that suit in July 2007, claiming AMD and five other technology companies infringed patents that cover an input-output interface between a host and a peripheral device.
AMD, the last of the six companies to settle with OPTi, said in an April filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the settlement would result in a patent license to AMD in exchange for a series of payments.
The patents-in-suit are U.S. Patent Numbers 5,710,906 and 6,405,291.
OPTi is represented in the current suit by Sam Baxter of McKool Smith and Michael Brody, Taras Gracey and Ethan McComb of Winston & Strawn LLP.
Counsel for the defendants could not be immediately identified.
The case is OPTi Inc. v. Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. et al., case number 2:10-cv-00279-TJW, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. |
