Intel and VIA settle patent lawsuits

By Alun Williams

Posted on 8 Apr 2003 at 12:15

Intel and VIA have agreed to settle their long-running legal dispute without the further aid of lawyers.

The dispute, which has lasted more than a year and a half, involves a series of patent-related lawsuits covering chipsets and microprocessors. The battle has spanned five countries, with 11 pending cases involving 27 patents.

Under the terms of the settlement, according to Intel, both companies halt all pending legal claims and settle their own costs. Intel and VIA have also entered into a 10-year patent cross license agreement covering each other's products.

Specifically, Intel has granted VIA a licence to sell microprocessors that are compatible with the x86 instruction set. However, this licence will not cover microprocessors that are pin-compatible or bus compatible with Intel microprocessors.

On the issue of chipsets, VIA has been granted a four-year licence to design and sell Intel processor bus-compatible chipsets. This agreement will be royalty bearing to Intel for some products.

Intel has also announced that it has agreed - for three years - not to assert its patents on VIA bus- or pin-compatible microprocessors.

It seems that the licence agreements do not apply to S3 Graphics, which is a company partially owned by VIA.

Other financial details of the agreement have not been disclosed.

What triggered the settlement? There was no one single development, sources from VIA told us - the escalation of legal costs, for example. Richard Brown, Marketing Manager for VIA, told us that ongoing negotiations had simply borne fruit. 'Both companies,' he said 'have the same interest to work togethwer in a reasonable framework. It's taken time to resolve the issues. We are better off competing and co-operating.'

The dispute began in September 2001 when Intel started litigation, claiming that VIA had infringed Intel patents with some of its microprocessor and chipset products. This lead to VIA counter-suing, claiming Intel microprocessors infringed patents of their own, specifically those it had acquired by buying IDT's Centaur subsidiary.