Acacia alleges Intel’s Itanium line of chips and some digital signal processors sold by Texas Instruments infringe on a patent it owns that relates to high-speed architecture used in advanced processors.
Acacia said the architecture enables conditional instruction, which helps determine how a processor executes instructions and whether those instructions should later be written to memory. Significant improvements in processor speeds are achieved by conditionally executing instructions in this architecture, Acacia said.
In court filings, Acacia said Intel and Texas Instruments had received a written offer to license the technology from Acacia. The amount of damages sought by Acacia was not specified.
While Intel does not break out individual chip sales, analysts predict sales of Itanium processors will reach several billion dollars each year by 2007, Acacia said.
Shares in Newport Beach, California-based Acacia closed at $5.90 yesterday, up 2% from $5.78. The lawsuit was filed in the District Court for the Central District of California.
