Marvel, a company that manufactures semiconductors for use with integrated chips and technologies such as motherboards and microcontrollers, found itself at a crossroads with Carnegie Mellon University, which sued them for a whopping $1,169,140,271, making it the largest patent verdict in history, beating the Apple vs. Samsung fiasco earlier this year.
The patents describe a way to remove electronic noise from chips that allows them to be more accurate, which is vital especially in the common case that the chip is a part of a much large implementation of the device; a single error can adversely affect the entire system.
Marvel sold nearly 2.34 billion infringing chips to companies such as Seagate and Western Digital.
Intellectual property lawsuits have been increasing in number ever since the growing amount of globalization and the growth of fields such as communications. Universities specifically have been becoming more adamant with companies violating their patents, with Stanford University suing Roche for an HIV testing patent (which failed) and Cornell University suing Hewlett-Packard over a computer-processing patent (which succeeded with a payout of $53.5 million).
The reason universities tend to be so aggressive on suing based on intellectual property is simply because they have no true products of their own to be countersued; they are purely on the offensive. Some may even declare universities to be the new "patent trolls." However, this is not the case; many universities end up losing money from their patents.
Marvell has continued to press for a retrial.
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