Intergraph Escalates Legal Battle Against Intel

In continuation of its legal onslaught against Intel, Intergraph Corporation is now alleging that the chip giant has violated two of its patents that have been held since 1993. That same year, Intergraph and Intel initially partnered to create Windows NT workstations, and Intergraph ceased development of its C5 Clipper chip. On Monday, the Eastern District Court of Texas received a filing which targets Intel's new IA-64 EPIC architecture, core of the long awaited Itanium processor.

The lawsuit stems from Intel's use of parallel instruction computing in the IA-64, technology that Intergraph says it developed while designing the Clipper microprocessor. Although they revolve around Clipper, these claims are unrelated to an existing lawsuit filed in 1997 in an Alabama court. Specifically, the recent complaint addresses the techniques used to convey compiler-recognized parallelism to the hardware and the novel approach of routing instructions to any of the processing units.

When announcing details surrounding today's lawsuit, Intergraph Chairman and CEO Jim Taylor said, "We have filed this action separately against Intel's IA-64 products because these claims are unrelated to our Clipper patent claims in the Alabama court. Intel's Itanium-based products, which are just now becoming commercially available in the market, infringe upon Intergraph's patented PIC technology, developed almost a decade before Intel introduced the Itanium."

He went on to say, "The parallel instruction computing technology at issue in this lawsuit is another example of the leadership role Intergraph has played in computer design. I invite you to look at Intergraph's history of technological advances at www.intergraph.com/ingrhistory.htm. I believe it will point out the significance of the Clipper patents, which are being violated by the Pentium processors, as well as the PIC patents, which are now beginning to be violated by the Itanium processor."

This lawsuit represents the second patent infringement complaint that Intergraph has filed against Intel.

Intel was not available for comment by press time.