A US federal jury has ordered Apple to pay $234 million to University of Wisconsin over patent infringement case. The case involved Gurindar Sohi and Terani Vijaykumar, both electrical and electronics engineering graduates of Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani.
The US federal jury ruled that Apple had used technology which was patented by the two along with two others, when Apple was developing processors for its iPads and iPhones. The amount was less than the $400 million the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) was claiming in damages($862M). Apple had incorporated technology owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s licensing arm without permission in chips found in many of its most popular devices. The case relates to Apple’s use of A7, A8, and A8X chips, which are present in the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6 and the new iPhone 6S and also some models of the iPad. These chips are said to contain technology covered by a 1998 patent filed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (aka WARF).
In 1998, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) had filed a patent for a paper titled: “Table based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer,” and had received patent # 5781752, also called the ‘752 patent’. Trial proceedings began on October 5, over a year and a half after WARF first filed its complaint against Apple with the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in early 2014. Apple said that it planned to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which handles intellectual property cases, but declined further comment