Patent battles are piling up within the smartphone industry, and now NVIDIA is suing Samsung and Qualcomm at the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and the U.S. District Court in Delaware for an alleged patent infringement.
The GPU company is asking the court to block shipments of particular Samsung devices and to have Samsung pay them damages brought by the alleged infringement.
On its blog, NVIDIA said that it "is asking the ITC to block shipments of Samsung Galaxy mobile phones and tablets containing Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali or Imagination's PowerVR graphics architectures."
The graphic processing unit company is also asking the Delaware court that it be paid for the damages resulted by the infringement of their patents.
NVIDIA noted that they had negotiations with Samsung regarding the patent license and how NVIDIA's patents apply to all Samsung's mobile devices and "to all graphics architectures they use", but the meetings had no progress.
According to NVIDIA, "Samsung repeatedly said that this was mostly their suppliers' problem."
"Without licensing NVIDIA's patented GPU technology, Samsung and Qualcomm have chosen to deploy our IP without proper compensation to us," the blog entry said.
In a news conference, NVIDIA Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang was quoted saying: "They're using our technology for free in their devices today and they're shipping an enormous number of devices," BBC News reported.
GPU or graphic processing unit performs calculations in order to render images and is almost similar with computer's CPU.
Samsung has responded to the issue: "Following a thorough review of the complaint, we will take all measures necessary against Nvidia's claims," BBC News reported.
Qualcomm is reportedly not giving a statement yet.
This legal action of NVIDIA has added to the patent battles in smartphone industry.
In 2011, the Apple and Samsung patent war started, concerning the design of smartphones and tablet devices. According to digitaltrends.com, the two companies' legal row started after Samsung had begun selling Android devices.
In April 2014, the $929 million judgement against Samsung in the first U.S. trial became official. The next day, Samsung filed a formal appeal.
Keep up here for more updates on this NVIDIA issue and other patent battles.
