Caltech claims Samsung infringed wifi patents
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has sued Samsung in federal court, alleging that the mobile giant’s devices infringed wifi patents that were at the centre of a billion-dollar damages case against Apple and Broadcom last year.
The five patents-in-suit refer to “Serial concatenation of interleaved convolutional codes forming turbo-like codes” and broadly disclose “seminal improvement to coding systems and methods” related to wifi technology.
Caltech’s suits against Apple and Broadcom netted the university approximately $1.1 billion in damages, following a jury verdict that found wifi products from both Apple and Broadcom infringed US patents 7,116,710, 7,421,032, and 7,916,781.
“As in the case against Apple and Broadcom, Caltech seeks a reasonable royalty from Samsung as compensation for its infringement of the ’710, ’032, and ’781 patents,” said the complaint, filed with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Caltech listed the Samsung products that it claims infringe on its patents, including the Galaxy, Note, A Series, and B Series mobiles, as well as the Samsung laptops, watches, TVs and other wifi-enabled devices.
According to the university, the “LDPC encoders” in the product chips meet claim limitations in Caltech’s patents, due to their “implementation of the 802.11n, 802.11ac, and/or 802.11ax wifi standards”.
Apple and Broadcom suit
In May 2016, Caltech filed a patent infringement suit against Apple and Broadcom in the Central District of California, alleging the two companies infringed the ‘710, ‘032, ‘781 and ‘833 patents.
On January 29, 2020, a jury rendered a final verdict finding that Apple and Broadcom’s wifi products infringed the ‘710, ‘032, and ‘781 patents.
Throughout the proceedings, the court dismissed the “vast majority” of Apple and Broadcom’s defences and counter-claims, as well as their motions for summary judgment of non-infringement.
Apple also filed ten inter partes review petitions with the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) seeking to invalidate the four patents, but the PTAB either denied institution or upheld the patentability of the claims in all ten petitions.
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