Nvidia has filed a patent lawsuits against Samsung and Qualcomm claiming that both companies are infringing upon its graphics chip patents and is asked for shipment blocking of Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets.


According to a blog post from Nvidia, it appears that the company has tried to negotiate about these patents directly with Samsung but apparently companies could not reach a deal on the matter. NVidia's Chief Administrative Officer, David Shannon, noted that while companies had several meetings at which Nvidia demonstrated how their patents apply to all mobile devices and graphics architectures they use, companies made no progress and "Samsung repeatedly said that this was mostly their suppliers' problem."

Shannon also noted that without licensing Nvidia's patented GPU technology, both Samsung and Qualcomm have chosen to deploy our IP without proper compensation to the company. Nvidia also released a list of seven patents that will assert in these cases, including:

- the GPU, which puts onto a single chip all the functions necessary to process graphics and light up screens
- invention of programmable shading, which allows non-experts to program sophisticated graphics
- invention of unified shaders, which allow every processing unit in the GPU to be used for different purposes
- invention of multithreaded parallel processing in GPUs, which enables processing to occur concurrently on separate threads while accessing the same memory and other resources

Nvidia is asking the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to block shipments of Samsung Galaxy mobile phones and tablets containing Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures as well as asking the the U.S. District Court, in Delaware to award damages for the infringement of the aforementioned patents.

While Nvidia might eventually come up with a deal with Samsung, or end the lawsuit, the situation with Qualcomm is a bit more complicated as this will extend to a far wider range of devices coming from almost every manufacturer and not just Samsung.



Source: Nvidia.com.