ITC Judge Finds that SiRF Infringes Six Broadcom GPS Patents

(Business News & Technology News, 12 Aug 2008)

A U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) judge has ruled that products of SiRF Technology Holdings Inc. infringe six patents related to improving global positioning system (GPS) processing and sensitivity. The patents are held by Global Locate Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Broadcom Corp.

The Initial Determination containing the infringement ruling followed a trial earlier this year. A Final Determination by the full six-person Commission is expected by early December.

The infringement findings cover a range of SiRF products, including those incorporating the SiRFstarIII and SiRFInstant GPS architectures.

ITC Administrative Law Judge Carl C. Charneski's ruling in favor of Broadcom comes on the heels of a June ruling by a separate ITC judge, who rejected SiRF's allegations that Broadcom had infringed two of its patents.

"We are pleased that in two separate patent cases in front of two different ITC judges Broadcom has prevailed at trial, with rulings that support our position that SiRF infringes our intellectual property but that we do not infringe theirs," says David Rosmann, Broadcom's Vice President, Intellectual Property Litigation.

The six patents that SiRF was found to infringe are United States patents 6,417,801; 6,937,187; 6,606,346; 7,158,080; 6,704,651; 6,651,000—relating to extended ephemeris assistance (Long Term Orbits), calculating time in GPS receivers, enhancing sensitivity in assisted GPS systems, and implementing hardware structures for parallel correlation.

In addition to the infringement claims against SiRF in the ITC, Broadcom and Global Locate have sued SiRF in the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., in two different filings, with claims of infringement of four patents filed in January 2007 and claims of infringement relating to four additional patents, including patents covering SiRF's multimedia processors and GPS receivers, filed in May 2008.

The May lawsuit resulted after numerous attempts by Broadcom to resolve all patent disputes between its Global Locate subsidiary, acquired in July 2007, and SiRF, which previously sued Global Locate in both the ITC and U.S. District Court.

"Prior to the ITC trials earlier this year, we had been optimistic that the companies would be able to cooperatively resolve their differences," Rosmann says. "However, when that hope diminished, we took additional actions to ensure protection of our IP rights. We remain open to reaching a mutually acceptable resolution of these disputes."

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