Marvell Semiconductor had a $1.17 billion judgement against them for infringement of two patents held by Carnegie Mellon University. Ambercite's prior art finder and their Amberscope patent analysis software were used to do the analysis below. These services can be purchased starting at $300 per patent reviewed.
Marvel claimed that these patents were anticipated by US patent 6282251 to Seagate. Whether the Seagate patent is valid prior art for two Canargie Mellon patents is a matter for the appeal for this case.
Citation links to Marvell Semiconductor
Carnegie would not have had to look far for suggestions that Marvell may need to take a license to their two patents.
It is worth considering how the Marvel patents are connected to the Carnegie patents. The figure below shows an AmberScope network of the patents.
You can also see the Marvel patents (green) are distributed mainly in the bottom right cluster, although some patents are found in the cluster on the left. This cluster of Marvel patents would suggest a number of patents filed for similar inventions by Marvel, which in turn suggests a technology investment by Marvel in this technology area. So an investigator in this area would be well advised to review this patents to see if they described a technology, which if being commercialised by the patent owner, may infringe other patents in this area.
Conclusions
AmberScope was used to identify some potential prior art, and provide some perspective on the relative value of these patents. Overall, notwithstanding the complexity of the technology and value of hard disc drives, this analysis has suggested that the billion dollar infringement cannot be supported by the relative dominance of the patents identified by our analysis.
