GPS wars: Broadcom wins patent victory against SiRF

Davey Winder
Saturday, 09 August 2008 19:41

IT Policy - Regulation

Specifically, the six patents that SiRF has been found to infringe are: 6,417,801; 6,937,187; 6,606,346; 7,158,080; 6,704,651 and 6,651,000. These relate to extended ephemeris assistance, calculating time in GPS receivers, enhancing sensitivity in assisted GPS systems, and implementing hardware structures for parallel correlation.

In other words, the kind of technology we are increasingly finding in our GPS enabled mobile phones as well as portable Satnav devices and which help them find a signal, lock onto to and keep it better than ever before.

"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," said David Rosmann, Broadcom's Vice President, Intellectual Property Litigation.

Broadcom and Global Locate have also sued SiRF in the US District Court with claims of infringement concerning four patents filed in January 2007, and four additional patents covering SiRF's multimedia processors and GPS receivers filed in May 2008.

"Prior to the ITC trials earlier this year, we had been optimistic that the companies would be able to cooperatively resolve their differences," Rosmann said. "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."