NVIDIA Shield Tablet (Photo : http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/)
NVIDIA and Samsung's legal battle over patents continues as the U.S. International Trade Commission announced on Dec. 23, Tuesday, that it will start an investigation into NVIDIA based on Samsung's complaints.
According to the South Korean tech firm, several NVIDIA products allegedly infringed on some of Samsung's patents.
General counsel for NVIDIA David Shannon wrote in a blog post that Samsung's complaints were a move for "typical legal ping pong." NVIDIA was the first to file an intellectual property (IP) infringement claim against Samsung in September.
Shannon wrote that Samsung was attempting to "intimidate" their business partners and that NVIDIA is looking forward in the court settling the case.
In September, NVIDIA filed a complaint against Samsung and Qualcomm, a mobile processor maker, alleging the latter of violating graphics patents. NVIDIA also demanded that the ITC block the U.S. shipments of some of Samsung's smartphones, including the Galaxy S4, Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy Note 4.
NVIDIA's complaint was answered by ITC in October, saying that it has agreed to investigate Samsung over the patent matter.
Samsung filed the complaint to ITC in November, asking the agency for an investigation into NVIDIA and some of its partners for four patents. Samsung also called for the permanent ban of several NVIDIA products, including the Shield tablet, Tegra mobile chips, Quadro graphics cards, GeForce graphic processors, Grid computing boards and Tesla accelerator cards as well as NVIDIA partners' devices using NVIDIA chips.
Besides NVIDIA, other firms named in the Samsung complaint include ZORAC, Wikipad, Sparkle Computer, Ouya, Mad Catz, Jaton, Fuhu, EVGA, Elitegroup Computer Systems and Biostar Microtech.
