The tech world is already a bit steamy today with the Trump ban as tech companies show that they are opposed to it. Now, just late last month, gaming technology giant AMD pursued companies, which it has accused of infringing patents.
The AMD complaint stated that the products from LG, MediaTek, Sigma Designs and Vizio infringe upon three graphics processing patents, two of which were originally belonging to ATI Technologies in the early 2000s. The other one was filed by AMD. According to AMD, the products negatively affect the legitimate licenses of the company's IP. The products included are MediaTek's Helio P10 SoC for smartphones and Sigma's SX7 (STV7701) SoC for UHD TVs that has HDR support.
Apparently, the patents in the complaint include unified shaders, parallel pipeline graphics system and a graphics processing architecture that employs unified shaders. It should be noted that these patents cover pretty basic aspects of graphics processing.
The companies that were included in AMD's complaint actually license their GPU technologies from developers like ARM and Imagination. Instead of suing the two companies, AMD ended up going after the chip manufacturers as it is generally difficult to sue over intangible ideas compared to physical products.
According to Anandtech, The United States International Trade Commission (US ITC) was called upon by the company to investigate the issue. The ITC has the power to ban products that will be identified of infringing on the intellectual property rights of AMD. The complaint further asked ITC to issue a limited exclusion order plus a cease and desist order to prevent the alleged infringing products from being brought to and sold in the United States.
AMD's rival Nvidia also had its fair share of legal battles. It recently settled a patent dispute with Samsung regarding Graphics technology. The whole affair has been messy ever since it began in 2014.
