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A little more than a year ago, NVIDIA, one of the largest graphics processing unit (GPU) companies in the world, claimed Samsung infringed on three of it's core patents and asked the ITC to ban Samsung smartphones and tablets that used Samsung's Exynos SoC (system on chip) and Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC. However, an ITC administrative law judge ruled that Samsung and Qualcomm did not infringe on two of NVIDIA's patents and declared the third that they did infringe to be invalid. After the case went to the full ITC commission, it upheld the administrative law judge's ruling in favor of Samsung. In turn, Samsung counter-sued NVIDIA claiming that it had violated three of Samsung's patents, specifically 6,147,385, 6,173,349 and 7,804,734 which date back to the 1990s covering implementation of SRAM. And now an ITC administrative law judge (ALJ) has found NVIDIA did violate those patents and the case is set to go before the full ITC commission. NVIDIA argues that the patents Samsung used in its countersuit are outdated and no longer used in modern designs: "We look forward to seeking review by the full ITC which will decide this case several months from now." One of the three patents is set to expire in 2016. NVIDIA, despite being the world leader in visual computing on the desktop, has not had much success in replicating that dominance in mobile designs with it's Tegra SoC and has since moved on to using its technology in other products and applications such as the Drive PX self-driving platform and it's consumer SHIELD android based gaming box. Sources: Seeking Alpha, Anandtech View full article