Opti, a chip-oriented intellectual property company, has filed a lawsuit alleging that AMD violated three patents with its Opteron processors and other products.
Opti, which is based in Mountain View, California, alleges in its patent infringement suit that the chipmaker infringed on patents related to "predictive snooping" technology.
Several months ago, Opti reached an $11m (£5.8m) cash settlement with graphics chipmaker Nvidia over similar patent infringement claims, Bernard Marren, Opti's chief executive, said Friday.
Opti alleges that AMD infringed on its patents 5,710,906, 5,813,036 and 6,405,291. The technology is designed to shorten the delay of an inquire cycle when a PCI bus controller receives a data transfer request from a PCI bus master.
The company asserts that its three patents on "predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses" were infringed by AMD, which allegedly made, sold and offered chips and core logic products based on the predictive snooping technology.
"We notified [AMD] four years ago that they were violating our patents and how they were doing it," Marren said. "They use our technology in their Opteron processors and other processors."
AMD declined to comment on Friday, explaining it has not received a copy of the lawsuit. Opti's announcement said it filed its case in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Opti, which five years ago sold its chipset design operations to concentrate on licensing its patents, is seeking a jury trial. The company is also seeking an injunction and undisclosed damages.
Talkback
We were talking about this sort of thing in the 70s UK and I am pretty certain it was implemented on mainframes, so what gives?
OK the processors are smaller but the ideas were already public domain and therefore a natural follow on to any new designs, so where does the patent issue come into it.