AMD and ATI Technologies ULC are at war with Realtek Semiconductor and TCL Industries Holdings. Over patents. AMD and ATI have filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) stating that the companies have violated five patents and brought products infringing their patents into the US for sale. The Amd Patent Infringement lawsuit urges the USIT to conduct a fair investigation and to ban products that are found guilty of violating patents.

What is patent infringement?

When anyone makes, sells, or promotes products without taking explicit permission from the patent holder it amounts to Patent Infringement. Being accused of patent infringement can result in huge penalties, amounting to fines or suspension of licenses. Patent infringement can take different forms and can range from direct infringement to induced infringement, wherein one party convinces another to make a patented invention. In the US, patent infringement is not a federal crime but treated as civil matter. If proved in court, it can attract heavy penalties and the court may even direct the guilt party to pay the patent-holder monetary compensation.

Section 337 declares the infringement of a US patent, copyright, registered trademark, or mask work to be an unlawful practice in import trade. Violators of USITC section 337 orders are liable for civil penalties of up to $100,000 a day or twice the value of the imported articles.

The first step of the ‘Section 337 Investigation’ is for the Chief Administrative Law Judge of the USITC to designate a presiding Administrative Law Judge to oversee an evidentiary hearing to determine if there has been a violation of Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

The USITC Investigation

Taking note of the complaint, the USITC mentioned that it will investigate the graphics systems, components, and digital systems which violate the law. AMD and ATI filed the complaint on May 5, 2022 seeking an exclusion order and urging the companies to stop selling the patent-infringing products.  The USITC announced that it will begin investigating the claims on June 1. AMD and ATI Technologies ULC of Canada, which AMD purchased back in 2006, claims Mediatek and TCL Industries violated five patents covering various graphics technologies. 

The ATI patents list texture decompression strategies, a graphics processing structure with a unified shader, and a multi-threaded graphics processing system (patents 7,742,053 claims 1-9, 8,760,454 claims 2-11, and 11,184,628 claims 7-12). The AMD patents cowl a way and system for synchronizing thread wavefront information and occasions, and a patent overlaying a processing unit that permits asynchronous process dispatch (patents 8,468,547 claims 16-21, and eight,854,381 claims 15-20). 

In 2017, a case of AMD patent infringement was filed against Vizio, Sigma Designs, MediaTek, and LG claiming the companies infringed on three of its patents. The patent infringement lawsuit stated that the companies had indulged in AMD patent infringement of three patents covering fundamental aspects of contemporary graphics processing, such unified shaders (‘133), parallel pipeline graphics system (‘506), as well as a graphics processing architecture employing unified shaders (‘454). The companies listed in the AMD patent infringement case use chips manufactured by Imagination Technologies and Arm. Instead of going after these companies directly, AMD took the companies that use their chips to court. Later, LG settled the case, while AMD sued MediaTek for violating multiple patents.  

After concluding an investigation, the USITC must ideally complete a patent infringement lawsuit within 45 days from the day an investigation is instituted. The agency is also authorized to issue temporary cease and desist orders in exceptional cases. Eventually, it can also include trial proceedings before administrative law judges and the complaints are reviewed by the Commission.

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