Wisconsin University wins$234m in Apple patent case
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the patent licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, won £152m $234m worth of damages for patent infringement by Apple ordered by a US jury. The verdict was important to guard its inventions from unauthorized use.
The Jury had earlier come to the conclusion that Apple incorporated patented microchip technology into some iPhone 5s, 6 , 6 plus, 6S, 6S Plus, iPads without permission. Apple said it would appeal.
The amount was less than the foundation had claimed as it originally sought £862m. The sum was lower in part because the judge ruled that Apple had not willingly infringed the patent.
University of Wisconsin-Madison computer sciences professor Dr Gurindar Sohi, one of the inventors of the microchip technology designed to boost the performance of computer processors – was in the Federal court for the verdict.
Professor Gurindar S Sohi has a PhD in Electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois and has co-authored several papers and patents that have influenced both researchers and commercial microprocessors. In the mid 1980s when most computer architects were investigating in-order processors, he investigated out-of-order processors. His paper “Instruction Issue Logic for High-performance, Interruptible Pipelined Processors” in ISCA 1987 articulated a model for a dynamically scheduled processor supporting precise exceptions, a model widely adopted by microprocessor manufacturers. His paper High bandwidth Data Memory Systems for Superscalar processors in ASPLOS 1991 argued for non-blocking microprocessors to switch from blocking to non-blocking caches. Sohi’s research has been in the design of high performance computer systems. He continues to lead a research group investigating different models of speculative multithreading approximate programs, value communication prediction, chip multiprocessing and other innovations for future microprocessors.
The US District Judge William Conley said “ For Dr Sohi, I hope you felt that your invention was vindicated.”
Carl Gulbrandsen, Managing Director of the Wisconsin Alumini Research Foundation said “ This is case where hard work of our university researchers and the integrity of patenting and licensing discoveries has prevailed.”
The University of Wisconsin sued Intel over the same patent in 2008 and the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
Apple’s annual revenue in 2014 was $182bn,
A judge recently threw out another infringement case brought out by Nvidia the graphic card specialist that Samsung and others had infringed three of its patents.