Caltech wins $1.1 billion patent award against Apple and Broadcom

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Apple owes the California Institute of Technology $837 million for selling devices with patent-infringing Wi-Fi chips, a Los Angeles federal jury ruled on Wednesday. Broadcom, which sold the chips to Apple, owes Caltech another $270 million.

The nine-person jury in the US District Court for the Central District of California reached its verdict after a two-week trial, the Los Angeles Times and Law360 report. Apple and Broadcom plan to appeal the decision.

The patents claim irregular repeat-accumulate codes, a mathematical technique for encoding data that allows it to be reconstructed if some bits are scrambled during transmission. Error-correcting codes have been used in communications networks for decades, but IRA codes offered a better tradeoff between robustness and decoding time than previous techniques. Researchers at Caltech published a paper about the technique in 2000 and filed several patent applications around the same time.

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