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Five PC Vendors Face Patent Lawsuit
Combuchan writes "This article from internetnews.com caught my attention: While Linux lawsuits gobble up the IT community's mindshare, a lesser-known legal action is being fought seeking billions of dollars from five PC vendors. Patriot Scientific, a small, San Diego-based seller of embedded microprocessors for automotive and scientific applications, is suing Sony, Fujitu, Matsushita, Toshiba, and NEC, alleging infringement of a Patriot patent for what it calls 'fundamental microprocessor technology.'"
Had anyone else not heard about this company before today?
It says in the article that Patriot's patent was issued last summer.
Pentium chips have been around since the mid-90's.
Doesn't this make for a ridiculously clear case of prior art?
I think what would help more than patent reform though is tort reform. For one, making the losing party pay is a start. Also, finding a way to reduce lawsuits or using arbitration more often will contribute significantly. Reforming the patent system would be nice too though.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
The claims enumerated in patent 6,598,148 describe nothing more than an SMP system where the cache ram takes up at least 51% of the core and where the clock is variable. This is nothing unique and any idiot trained in the arts would have seen it as a trivial invention (SMP, variable clock, and large caches have all existed for quite some time) and therefore not worthy of a patent. Furthermore I don't see where Intel or their clients could be violating it except for the speed throttling overheat protection in the P4 and family processors. I know it's been said many times before but as far as the IT industry is concerned the USPTO needs to be scrapped or seriously funded because the way things work now are NOT acceptable, it's too easy for a bogus, stupid, or overbroad patent to slip through.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Claim 1 does have some breadth. Arguably, though, this only covers systems with on-chip main memory (not cache) using more than half the real estate, some cache, and a variable-speed clock. Some microcontrollers fit those criteria, but they're not the most common ones. Bigger CPUs have off-chip memory, and low-end microcontrollers often have no cache system at all.
Why is it that they're suing Intel customers but not Intel itself... seems like they're afraid to go after somebody who might challenge them rather than settle...
Saying that Intel is an 800 pound gorilla is an understatement.
They don't want to fight Intel because they know that Intel's breadth of microproccessor technology is staggering. Probably enough to break the patent, if not rub out the company with legal entanglements.
This would be a good company for Intel to make an example of.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Patent No. 6,598,148,
appears to be a divisional patent from patent No. 5,982,231, filed in 1989. In summary, the invention describes a CPU using both stack and register-based instructions which interfaces directly to DRAM memory over 32 shared address and data lines. Memory accesses are minimized by using mainly stack-based instructions and accessing memory in fast page mode. The invention is designed to minimize cost, fitting just tens of thousands of transistors into a 44-pin package, while delivering approximately 20 MIPS performance. While none of the design elements by themselves are new or unique, the particular combination chosen seems to fit the definition of a real invention that was not in existence before 1989.
The features which seem to relate to its claims of variable speed are the use of an on-board ring oscillator to drive the system clock, and memory cycle timing which automatically adjusts to the loading seen from attached memory devices. Using an on-board ring oscillator means that the system clock can be driven by a device built with process parameters identical to other devices on the chip. If CPU transistors are a little slow on a batch of chips, the ring oscillator transistors will be similarly slow and the chips will continue to work at a slower but reliable speed.
It's just not clear to me how Patriot Scientific can claim that companies like Intel are infringing on their patent. Is it because Intel's products contain technology which also happens to appear in their invention, but which they themselves did not invent? None of the individual technologies used in the Patriot device originated with them, and it appears that only the specific combination of those technologies described in the patent application would have qualified it for approval. However, the patent claims are written in such a way as to seemingly describe a much broader range of CPU designs, many examples of which were certainly in existence before even the original patent application by Patriot was filed.
I've seen it stated that the claims are the only important part of a patent. That seems to be the big problem with this particular patent. What happens when a legitimate invention is granted a patent with overly broad claims? Some patents are written with claims that include a range of claims, some very specific and some very broad, on the assumption that it's better to aim for as much as possible and settle for what you can get. This particular patent seems to have only broad claims. Does that make it easier or harder to try and overturn?
The patent application is very specific about using a ring oscillator to control the processor clock. Most processors use PLL (phase locked loop) devices to control their clock frequency.
Typically only asynchronous CPUs are clocked by free-running ring oscillators. Almost all CPUs on the market, including embedded CPUs, are synchronous designs and they come in fixed speed grades, which makes PLL clocking very attractive.
Even with PLLs you can vary the clock speed, e.g. when you detect that the chip is too hot or when the work load is low the CPU clock can be scaled down in discrete steps.
A ring oscillator provides a non-discrete (continue) frequency range, but on the downside its clock frequency is very unstable compared to PLLs, which is bad for synchronous designs.
There is also prior art: the early MIPS processor implementations had a free running multiplier, which operated as fast as the silicon would allow, even though the rest of the CPU was clocked at a fixed frequency.
In summary: this patent is not worth a lot.
At least, I assume they do, considering that IBM has ~25,000 active patents
Don't assume anything. Companys like IBM file "defensive" patents all the time just to keep from being sued by little guys.
About 75% of the patent nightmares we've seen lately are from the tech bubble where high end companys go down the toilet. The decades of defensive patents become the best hope for survival and a new wave of patent lawsutes washes over the landscape.
I'm sure the surviving tech giants are sick and tired of not only having to file new patents but also for being sued by former giants who couldn't survive.
I don't actually exist.
What needs to happen is these "Patent" companies loose big in a few lawsuits and go under.. So when a company does go out and try to "Inforce IP rights" Thier stock value plummets.. So it would leave nothing but well founded IP claims and heaven forbid Notices to companies when they start selling technology that has potential IP right infringement and get it all sorted out before the product with potential of IP infringement goes mainstream.
Companies knowing that there is IP infringement taking place and not communicating with companies that are potentially infringing on thier IP should loose the ability to sue these companies for infringing. If a product is in the mainstream that does contain infringed IP there should be a grace period where time to remedy is given unless it can be demonstrated that the infringment was done with full or partial knowladge of its potential for infringment.
It just seems to be the easiest way to due business these days as you can file and obtain board patents and sit on your hands till its well into the mainstream then sue everyone(well people that make money on it anyways) without cost of actualy development or marketing and associated costs with possible product failure. So it would seem that is would be the best business practice for maximizing profit margins when you don't actually need to do anything but have a team of high priced lawyers and a good engineering teams that have a good feel for the marketplace and what technologies will hit the mainstream and how to capitilize on them trough broad sweeping patents that will cover the core essential mechanisms that these technologies will require to properly function.
There shuold be some legal mechanisms put in place to prevent the IP equivilant of "Cyber Squatters" to domain names... If companies file and obtains patents for technologies they have little or no interest in bringing to the market they have no right to prevent anyone else from doing so or taking legal action against companies that invest/develop/market these technologies.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt