Friday, 21 September 2007

Qualcomm Again In ITCs Line Of Fire

Qualcomm’s patent war with Nokia and Broadcom got even murkier after the dispute appellate International Trade Commission (ITC) said it would investigate whether the developer of CDMA....

Qualcomm’s patent war with Nokia and Broadcom got even murkier after the dispute appellate International Trade Commission (ITC) said it would investigate whether the developer of CDMA technology violated any patents held by Nokia.

The ITC will now investigate San Diego based Qualcomm’s baseband processor chips, RF chips, single chip solutions, base station processor chips and other chips. The chips are being used in many 3G mobile devices.

It was this patent violation that prompted the ITC to earlier ban the imports of certain phones and devices that contained these chips. However earlier this month, the Court of Appeals ordered a reprieve for Qualcomm.

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phones maker by revenues and sales and based in Espoo, Finland had filed its complaint with the ITC on June 16 and the decision to commence investigations sends the matter to an ITC administrative court.

The Nokia case erupted after Qualcomm filed its own patent infringement complaint against Nokia with the ITC in 2006. The two companies are also trading patent infringement claims against each other in courts from California to Texas.

In fact, as the largest maker of cell phones, Nokia thought the best way to hurt Qualcomm as to stop the manufacture of CDMA phones.