Federal Circuit remands patent claim against Huawei and Samsung
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has remanded a patent infringement claim against technology companies including Huawei and Samsung to a district court.
In a decision handed down on Friday, March 3, the court altered a claim construction but added that the “minor modification” is unlikely to affect the outcome of the case.
In 2014, Technology Properties accused Huawei, Samsung, ZTE, LG and Nintendo of infringing US patent number 5,809,336, in five separate lawsuits filed at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The patent discloses a microprocessor with two independent clocks—a variable frequency system clock connected to the central processing unit (CPU) and a fixed-frequency clock connected to the input/output interface.
Claim 6 of the patent requires “an entire oscillator disposed upon said integrated circuit substrate”, which refers to the variable-frequency CPU clock.
The district court construed the term to mean “an oscillator located entirely on the same semiconductor substrate as the central processing unit that does not require a control signal and whose frequency is not fixed by any external crystal”.
Although the parties agreed to the first half of the construction, Technology Properties disputed the portion called “that does not require a control signal and whose frequency is not fixed by any external crystal”.
Technology Properties appealed and the Federal Circuit consolidated the appeals.
“The district court erred by holding that the patentee disclaimed any use of a command signal by the entire oscillator,” said the court.
Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore, on behalf of the court, said that the term “entire oscillator” is properly construed as one “that does not require a command input to change the clock frequency”.
Because the district court erred in a portion of its construction, the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded the suit.
Did you enjoy reading this story? Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox.
