Intel faces ban on Itanium

By Alun Williams

Posted on 31 Oct 2002 at 13:07

The final judgement of a US District Court has found against Intel and its use of two patents owned by Intergraph. These relate to parallel instruction computing (PIC).

The injunction on making the processors has been suspended until 29 November, however. Thirty days grace has been allowed by the Judge, to allow Intel to appeal the decision. The chip giant has already declared it will continue legal proceedings.

As we reported earlier this month - Patents court gets picky with Intel - both parties have already timetabled the progress of the case through the courts, agreeing stage payments according to the allotment of guilt.

Intel now faces a payment of $150m to Intergraph Corporation - in addition to previous settlements. Under the terms of the original agreement, if Intel should lose the appeal it will be due to pay another $100m in order to obtain a licence on the patents.

At the heart of the dispute was technology developed by Intergraph in 1992 for its C5 Clipper microprocessor. Subsequently, Intergraph's patented PIC technology became a component of Intel's IA-64 EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) architecture. This is used by Intel's Itanium chip.

Back in April 2002 Intel and Intergraph agreed to settle another 1997 patent infringement case. Under the agreement, Intel made a cash payment of $300m to Intergraph for the right to license all Intergraph patents and patent applications filed before 4 April 2012. With the exception of the two patents at issue in this latest case.