Judgment: Apple is a patent infringer
A patent infringement suit filed against Apple by California integrated circuit company OPTi two years ago has been decided, and Apple has been declared the loser.
The suit was filed in the heartland of patent litigation, the Eastern District of Texas, where Microsoft was sued over its JPEG patent, Sony was sued for its Cell Chip technology, Google was sued for its Database technology, and countless others are sued every day.
US District Judge Charles Everingham handed down a $19 million patent infringement ruling, which determined that Apple had violated OPTi's patent for "Predictive Snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses," which describes a method of high-speed communication between a physical bus and L1 cache memory.
Apple attempted to contest the validity of OPTi's patent by citing prior art and obviousness, but the jury was not convinced, and determined that Apple's infringement was willful and therefore worth $19,009,728 in damages to OPTi, the company which has sued a handful of notable tech companies in Texas, including Nvidia and AMD.