The U.S. International Trade Commission has opened an investigation into Samsung products after NVIDIA filed a patent infringement case against the tech giant.
Samsung, the world leader in smartphone business, is being investigated by the U.S. International Trade Commission for breaching certain graphics patents in its latest line of products that are owned by NVIDIA. ITC decided to open a formal investigation on Monday following NVIDIA's patent complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm last month. Through the latest investigation, ITC will determine whether Samsung's latest devices such as the Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy S5 among others should be banned from entering the country.
Samsung widely uses processors from Qualcomm in the Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801 and the latest 805 series and it also uses its home-grown Exynos processors in some of its latest devices. Other Samsung products in question are Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy S4, Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy Note Pro and Galaxy Tab 2. Most of the devices are recently launched in the market and serve as the company's flagship products for different series.
"We are pleased with the ITC decision today to open an investigation and look forward to presenting our case on how NVIDIA GPU patents are being used without a license," David Shannon, executive vice president and chief administrative officer at NVIDIA, said in a response statement about ITC's decision to launch an investigation.
In addition to the ITC complaint, NVIDIA also filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung in the US District Court in Delaware, CNET reports. The chipmaker is also seeking damages for the alleged infringement.
"Instead of developing its own graphics processing technology, Samsung purchases and uses Qualcomm's infringing processors and GPUs, as well as other processors and GPUs that infringe the claims of the asserted patents," Computer World found Nvidia's statement in its complaint filed in the Delaware court.
As for Samsung, the latest infringement case is an addition to the ongoing patent wars with other companies. Apple is Samsung's biggest rival in the legal wars across the U.S. Most recently, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Samsung for not paying the annual patent licensing royalties, which tally up to $1 billion plus nearly $7 million in interest.
