Intel may face some difficulties selling some of its CPUs in the country of Germany soon. The concern arose after a regional court in Düsseldorf ruled that the chipmaker had infringed on a patent of the US-based company, R2 Semiconductor, and was subsequently issued an injunction against the sales of select processors.
In conjunction with the injunction, Dell and HP, two of Intel’s oldest partners, may also be affected. Specifically, the European patent that R2 Semiconductor is disputing claims that the blue chipmaker stole designs that covers voltage-regulating technology, and that said technology can be found in Core Series Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Alder Lake, and Xeon Scalable “Ice Lake Servers” processors. Intel has, naturally, denied these allegations, saying that the only reason it is being brought to court about this is because R2’s patent in the US had been invalidated and that the company is nothing more than a patent troll.
In a statement to the Financial Times, Intel says it believe that “companies like R2, which appears to be a shell company whose only business is litigation, should not be allowed to obtain injunctions on CPUs and other critical components at the expense of consumers, workers, national security, and the economy.”
R2 Semiconductor eventually issued a statement over the injunction. “We are delighted that the highly respected German court has issued an injunction and unequivocally found that Intel has infringed R2’s patents for integrated voltage regulators. R2 has been a semiconductor IP developer, similar to ARM and Rambus, for more than 15 years. Intel is intimately familiar with R2’s business —in fact, the companies were in the final stages of an investment by Intel into R2 in 2015 when Intel unilaterally terminated the process.”
(Source: Tom’s Hardware, FT)
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