AMD files ITC patent complaint against LG, MediaTek, VIZIO, and Sigma

TechPowerUp breaks news that AMD has filed a patent infringement complaint against LG, MediaTek, VIZIO, and Sigma. The chip designer claims the four companies import products into the US which infringe on three AMD graphics-related patents. Affected products include televisions and smartphones and the issue seems to be that these companies allegedly use key GPU technology patented by AMD without paying license money.

The basis for the complaint: some of these companies (namely, LG, MediaTek, VIZIO, and Sigma) unlawfully import into or sell inside the U.S. products which infringe on AMD's graphics intelectual property - namely, on U.S. Patent Nos. 7,633,506 (the '506 patent), 7,796,133 (the '133 patent) and 8,760,454 (the '454 patent) (collectively, the "asserted patents".

According to the complaint, these patents generally relate to architectures for graphics processing unit (GPU) circuitry. The '506 patent relates to "a graphics processing architecture that enables a large amount of graphics data to be rendered to a frame buffer". The '133 patent relates to specialized "texture" processing circuitry that is employed by GPUs. Lastly, the '454 patent relates to a "unified shader" hardware architecture for GPUs. The complaint specifically refers to various televisions and smartphones, specifically, towards the graphics processing systems within those televisions and smartphones - as infringing products.

At the moment, AMD requests the ITC to investigate the issue and seeks an important ban on infringing products, presumably to force these companies to pay up licensing money. AMD also notes that Samsung is a licensee of these patents. More details over here.