Marvell and Carnegie reach $750m patent settlement

Marvell Technology Group has agreed to pay $750 million to settle its patent lawsuit with Carnegie Mellon University.

In a statement yesterday, February 17, the university confirmed it had settled the long-running row, which centred on two patents, acquired in 2001 and 2002, relating to detecting data on disk drives.

Carnegie sued Marvell at the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2009, claiming the company had sold billions of chips using the technology.

In a 2012 decision, the Pennsylvania court said Marvell infringed both patents and awarded Carnegie $1.17 billion in damages. The amount later rose to $1.54 billion after the sale of infringing products during litigation was also taken into account.

Marvell, which appealed against the ruling, was then handed a partial victory by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 2015 after it slashed the $1.54 billion damages to $278 million.

That $278 million applied to Marvell’s sales of infringing hard-disk drives, including those sold during litigation, within the US, but a three-judge panel unanimously said a new trial was needed to determine the damages owed for the sale and manufacture of infringing products outside the US.