A jury found that a Broadcom tuner chip infringed on a patent owned by Microtune. The judge in the case this week awarded the company $3m in damages as well as attorney's fees that, according to Microtune, could bring the award to between $7m (£4.39m) and $10m. The judge also made permanent an injunction preventing Broadcom from shipping one of its tuner chips, the BCM 3415, in the US.
"We're just glad to resolve the case, and the important thing here is that we got a permananent injunction related to Broadcom's products," said James A. Fontaine, chief executive of Microtune. "Our view was that they had a serious advantage in the marketplace based on copying our technology and bringing it to bear with their own strengths."
However, a Broadcom spokesman said the company was pleased by another ruling by the judge on Thursday that will allow Broadcom to keep shipping a new version of its tuner chip, the BCM 3416, which does not, according to Broadcom, use Microchip's technology. Chip tuners are used to deliver broadband voice, data and video communications to electronic devices such as personal computers, cable modems and set-top boxes.
"This allows us to move forward with our next-generation silicon tuner unencumbered," Broadcom spokesman Bill Blanning said. That chip, the BCM 3416, started shipping in June, he said. The company had halted US shipments of the earlier chip in April as a result of a preliminary injunction. Broadcom is still seeking a ruling by the judge that its new chip does not infringe the Microtune patent.
Blanning said Broadcom will appeal the damages award.
Microtune filed its suit against Broadcom in January 2001 for patent infringement related to the development of a "highly integrated silicon tuner on a single microcircuit." Microtune claimed in its case that it began developing the chip technology in 1996 and formally brought the idea to market with the release of its MicroTuner product in January 1999.
Earlier this year, the court upheld Microtune's patent and ordered Broadcom to halt sales of its own silicon tuner and related reference design boards also containing the technology. In issuing its latest decision, the court cited the existence of a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence that indicated Broadcom deliberately copied Microtune's technology in its chipsets.
Resolution of the patent dispute does not mark the end of legal wrangling between the two competitors. Earlier this year, Broadcom filed a separate suit against Microtune, alleging that Microtune's power amplifiers, tuners and Bluetooth products violate Broadcom patents. That suit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, involves Microtune's electrostatic discharge protection circuits and various wireless technologies.
The two companies are also tangled in a third patent lawsuit that Broadcom brought in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas that centres on Microtune's solid-state RF tuner products.
