very similar to what edig is doing right about now in changing their business strategy. (Second paragraph down) And we all know what PTSC is about now.

Intel OEM customers being sued for breaking the 120MHz barrier

2/8/2004 1:06:23 PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

Money grabs in the intellectual property world are obviously in vogue today, and Patriot Scientific doesn't want to be left in the dust. The company started targeting Intel's business partners in late 2003, suing the likes of Sony, Toshiba, and NEC for making products that purportedly infringe upon Patriot Scientific's patents. The key patent in question is rather old. Meet patent 5,440,749, "High performance, low cost microprocessor architecture." The patent was filed in 1989 and serves as the basis for a number of patents also now owned by the company. The two most important are as follows: 5,809,336, "High performance microprocessor having variable speed system clock." While the patent was only recently approved, it was filed in 1995. Then there's 6,598,148, "High performance microprocessor having variable speed system clock." Filed in 1998, the patent was approved in August of last year, and marks the beginning of the actualization of Patriot's litigious aspirations.

Recently, Patriot has made enforcement of its patent portfolio a cornerstone of its business strategy after deciding to emphasize sales of soft intellectual property cores over chips. The company sells a proprietary line of low-power, 32-bit RISC microprocessors called Ignite.To that end, the company earlier this year set out an "intellectual property compliance program" that targets hundreds of companies using microprocessors that exceed 120-MHz. "We're looking at quite a few companies," Wallin said. "We're approaching this market segment by market segment. We feel there are many companies benefiting from this right now."

120MHz! To date, Patriot has been primarily suing PC makers, even though the technology in question is that used by Intel (and others), who has yet to be sued. Clearly Patriot is hoping that they can bully enough Intel partners to get a nice cash settlement. Intel is more than willing to play hardball, however, and the company filed a suit in Federal Court last week to shut down Patriot's claims and to legally prevent them from suing Intel and its partners. Patriot has responded by saying that they will counter-sue Intel.

Patent matters are obtuse by nature, but it appears as thought Patriot is essentially arguing that they developed the technology to make CPUs faster by finding a way to regulate the internal CPU clock and to integrate that with variable clocks interfaced by the CPU, most notably those that govern DRAM access. In Patriot's own words,

Patriot Scientific's patents describe the principal means used by the microprocessor industry to increase the internal operating speed of modern microprocessors. [...] "Microprocessors operating at speeds above 110 - 120 MHz may be in violation of portions of our patent portfolio."

The scope of the patents in question is incredibly broad, covering both CISC and RISC architectures, meaning that Patriot could make claims against AMD, IBM, and Motorola to boot. Of course, in the patent world, you can make claims against Santa Claus. However, Intel is obviously confident, taking the first step to squash the infringement case by defending its customers.

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