It filed the complaint last week in the US district court for the Eastern District of Texas in a move likely to cause consternation at TI. The company is the giant of the DSP business and the products which are the subject of the complaint are used as embedded controllers in consumer products such as audio and video encoders and decoders, broadband systems, optical networking, telephony, voice processing, and wireless communications.
Huntsville, Alabama-based Intergraph won a major battle last year when Intel Corp agreed to pay it $300m to settle a five-year-old patent infringement lawsuit. It also agreed to pay up to $250m more if it loses a second unrelated case with the company.
Intergraph had claimed that Intel’s Pentium processors used technology developed for its now obsolete Clipper RISC processors. With Intel’s cash fattening its bank account, Intergraph launched patent lawsuits against Dell Computer Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Gateway Inc.
Defense of its IP has become by far the most lucrative operation for technical systems vendor Intergraph, whose core business is shrinking but whose bottom line is testimony to the skill of its lawyers.
In the fourth quarter to December 31, net income was $90.1m, up from income of $11.9m on revenue that fell 8.3% to $121.9m. For the year, net income was $377.7m, up from income of $19.9m, on revenue 5.8% higher at $501.2m.
Source: Computerwire
