Intel hit with $2.2 billion patent judgment

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A Texas jury has ordered Intel to pay $2.18 billion in damages for infringing two patents. The lawsuit was filed by VLSI Technology LLC, a 4-year-old firm that Intel says has no products and no sources of revenue besides patent litigation.

The patents at issue in the case previously belonged to NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch company that spun off from Philips in 2006. NXP acquired the patents when it bought Freescale Semiconductor (itself a spinoff of Motorola) in 2015. Intel's lawyer told jurors that NXP would get a portion of the proceeds from the lawsuit.

The two patents focus on methods for minimizing the power consumption of computing chips. One way to do this is by varying the system voltage: setting a higher voltage when high performance is needed, then lowering the voltage to conserve power afterward. One patent claims the concept of storing information about a memory chip's minimum voltage in nonvolatile memory so the system can ensure that the memory circuit has a high enough voltage.

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