US ITC judge rules Samsung and Qualcomm did not violate three NVIDIA GPU patents

NVIDIA suffered a blow last Friday as a judge from the US International Trade Commission cleared Samsung and Qualcomm from infringing on several of NVIDIA's patents. In the preliminary ruling, judge Thomas Pender ruled Samsung and Qualcomm didn't infringe two patents, he found the companies did infringe on a third, but ruled this patent invalid because it was not specific enough and too similar to other existing patents.

Nvidia, which claimed to have invented the first graphics processing chip and released it in 1999, accused Qualcomm of infringing patents in the Snapdragon processor line-up, and Samsung in its Exynos processors and several of its products, including Galaxy smartphones and tablets.

Things didn't go as Nvidia had hoped, and the firm isn't very happy about it. However, David Shannon, executive vice president at Nvidia, remains confident, and insisted that the company will continue to fight its case.

NVIDIA said it will ask the full commission to review the initial ruling to try to validate the third patent. This would allow NVIDIA to ask the ITC to issue an order for an import ban on infringing Samsung smartphones and smart TVs.

Samsung countersued NVIDIA last November in a federal court in Virginia, alleging patent infringement and cheating in benchmarks with its Tegra K1.