Jury Awards $1.169 Billion to Carnegie Mellon in Patent Case

A jury in Pittsburgh awarded $1.169 billion to Carnegie Mellon University in a patent infringement case against Marvell Semiconductor.

Carnegie Mellon University said case deals with fundamental technology for increasing the accuracy with which hard disk drive circuits read data from high speed magnetic disks.  Patents covered by the lawsuit were awarded to Jose Moura, a professor in the University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Aleksandar Kavcic, a former Ph.D. student of Moura who is now a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Hawaii.

For its part, Marvell asserts that the two CMU patents claiming a specific technique related to read channel detector technology is not practiced by any Marvell chips.  Furthermore, Marvell argues that "the theoretical methods described in these patents cannot practically be built in silicon even using the most advanced techniques available today, let alone with the technology available a decade ago."

http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/december/dec26_marvellverdict.html
http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID=3296