After a 7-year legal fight, Marvell Technology Group Ltd finally settled to pay Carnegie Mellon University $750 million over a patent infringement lawsuit that alleged the former of copying two of Carnegie's patented hard disk drive.
According to reports from Investors, the decision was made by the court after the initial ruling that Marvell should pay $1.5 billion to Carnegie. The federal appeals court said that the initial amount should be reduced and a new trial should be made. Initially, the federal court ordered Marvell to pay at least $278.4 million. That would be comparable to a royalty fine of 50 cents per chip on the 556.8 million chips imported to the U.S.
Marvell Technology Group Ltd, one of the global leaders in silicon solutions that is headquartered in Bermuda and operating at Santa Clara, California, has been sued by the private research institute Carnegie Mellon last March 2009 regarding patents of its hard disk drive, .
It has been reported by Reuters that Marvell allegedly copied Carnegie's hard disk drive features which read data from high-speed magnetic disk. The university added that the chip maker copied two of their patents that were established last 2001 and 2002. This patents made the chip a blowout, earning them billions of dollars without the knowledge of the University.
An earlier litigation by U.S District Judge Nora Barry Fischer last 2012 ordered Marvell to pay Carnegie Mellon $1.17 billion in damages plus interest, bumping it up to $1.54 billion. This is in relation to Marvell's intentional infringement of Carnegie's copyright.
Marvell has allocated $338 million of its earnings for the year 2016 for the payment of the settlement, as per PR News Wire .
According to Carnegie, a substantial share of the settled amount of $750 million dollars will go to the inventors of the chip namely, José Moura, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon and Aleksandar Kavcic, a former student and now a lecturer in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Hawaii.
