California-based R2 Semiconductor filed a lawsuit against Intel in a UK court in late 2023, seeking to block the sale of some of the company’s chips that infringe on R2 Semiconductor’s corporate patents. The company has filed similar cases in other jurisdictions. Its patent was previously invalidated in the US. Now a UK court has sided with Intel, but R2 Semiconductor’s lawsuits are still at various stages of consideration in Italy, France and Germany.
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The patent that R2 Semiconductor accuses Intel of infringing describes voltage regulators designed to protect chips from degradation or failure. R2 Semiconductor claims that Intel illegally used its intellectual property by integrating the technology into most of its processors. Intel argues that R2 Semiconductor’s patents are invalid, meaning it could not have infringed them.
In a February 2024 statement, Intel alleged that R2 Semiconductor was engaged in “a serial extortion of money from companies that are genuine innovators.” Intel succeeded in invalidating R2 Semiconductor’s patent in the US, after which R2 Semiconductor turned its attention to European courts.
A British court has agreed with Intel’s lawyers that R2 Semiconductor’s patents are invalid because they “lack the necessary inventive step” compared to the work of Jian Sun. Sun is one of the authors of a paper titled “3D Power Supply for Microprocessors and High-Performance ASIC” published in 2007 by a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
The court noted that Intel’s products would violate the patents if they were valid. Intel declined to comment. R2 Semiconductor also did not respond to journalists’ questions.
Unlike the British court, the Düsseldorf Regional Court ruled in February that Intel had infringed R2 Semiconductor’s patent and imposed an injunction on the sale of chips containing R2 Semiconductor’s patented technology. The case is currently on appeal.
Over the past few months, R2 Semiconductor has pursued similar legal action in other countries. In March, the company expanded its lawsuit to Intel’s Italian subsidiaries, and in April, it filed the same complaint in a French court.
R2 Semiconductor’s lawyers are also pursuing legal action against companies that use Intel processors, including OEMs such as HPE, Dell and Fujitsu, as well as cloud provider Amazon Web Services.
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