Intel Wins Patent Lawsuit Against R2 Semiconductor in UK Court

TapTechNews August 1st news, according to Reuters, Judge Richard Hacon of the High Court of England and Wales ruled on Wednesday local time that Intel won a patent lawsuit that could have led to the ban of some of its CPUs.

The British court determined that the relevant patent of the US company R2 Semiconductor, the plaintiff, did not add a 'creative step' on the basis of a third-party's fundamental invention, so the patent is invalid and Intel won.

However, Judge Hacon also mentioned in the judgment document that if R2's patent is valid, then Intel indeed infringed the patent.

The legal dispute between Intel and R2 focuses on the FIVR (TapTechNews note: the full name is Fully Integrated Voltage Regulators) fully integrated voltage regulator module on Intel CPUs.

The Intel processor with the FIVR design integrates various voltage regulator modules that were originally outside the CPU into the CPU entirely. Although this will increase the chip area to a certain extent, it can achieve more accurate voltage regulation.

Intel once introduced the FIVR module in the Haswell microarchitecture processor, but changed back to the original power supply design in the Skylake microarchitecture processor, and reintroduced it only until IceLake.

And R2 Semiconductor accused Intel's CPU products of infringing its patent on the FIVR design.

In fact, R2 Semiconductor and Intel's patent war is still ongoing globally:

The District Court of Düsseldorf, Germany, ruled in February this year that Intel's infringement of R2 is true and issued an order to ban the sale of consumer processors from IceLake to AlderLake and IceLake Xeon processors in Germany. Intel has appealed against this ruling in Germany;

In addition, the patent litigation between Intel and R2 is also ongoing in France and Italy;

And earlier, R2 also filed a similar patent lawsuit in the US, but Intel ended the dispute in the US by invalidating R2's US patent.