Santa Clara, California-based graphics accelerator company S3 Inc announced that it had filed a patent lawsuit against rival chipmaker Nvidia Corp after the markets closed yesterday, the latest of a complex series of lawsuits in this increasingly competitive market. Nvidia already faces a lawsuit from Silicon Graphics Inc, which sued over texture mapping technology last month (CI No 3,388). S3’s suit seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions that would stop Nvidia from manufacturing and distributing its RIVA family of accelerators. S3 says it believes patents in the controller circuitry, scalable video windows and mechanisms for mixing video and graphics data have been infringed. Nvidia’s chips are manufactured and sold by the likes of SGS Thomson and Taiwan Semiconductor, and the Sunnyvale, California-based company recently announced its Riva TNT, a 128- bit 3D processor directly competitive with S3’s Savage processor (CI No 3,403). It says that after launching its original RIVA 128 chip last September, it had shipped 1 million of the chips by year-end to computer and add-in card manufacturers such as Dell Computer Corp, Gateway 2000 Inc, Micron Electronic Co, NEC Corp, Diamond Multimedia Inc and STB Systems Inc. Meanwhile, S3 itself is mentioned in a suit from Apple Computer Inc, which is suing Exponential Technology Inc over graphics patents it sold on to S3 in an industry auction last year (CI No 3,389).
