US trade commission to investigate AMD complaint against LG, MediaTek and Vizio

The US Trade Commission, the USITC, has launched a formal investigation following a complaint from AMD. This one targets Vizio, LG, Sigma Designs and MediaTek. AMD believes the companies have infringed on its patents.

According to the USITC, the research focuses on products such as televisions, smartphones, tablets, wearables and GPUs that use, for example, ATI and AMD techniques in the field of unified shaders and parallel pipeline graphics systems. In an earlier version of the complaint, published by AnandTech, AMD alleges that the said companies are infringing its rights by selling or importing the listed products into the US.

With the complaint, AMD wants the products to be withdrawn from the market should the USITC find that the company’s rights have been violated. According to AnandTech, all companies named in the complaint use licenses for GPU technologies, which are issued by ARM and Imagination. It would be easier for AMD to go directly after manufacturers of infringing products such as TVs and smartphones than to bring a case against ARM and Imagination. This has to do with the fact that in the latter case a case would be about the underlying techniques instead of the products themselves.

An example of a potentially infringing product is MediaTek’s Helio P10 soc, which appears in LG devices. The soc uses a Mali T860MP2 GPU, which is licensed by ARM. According to AnandTech, AMD is most likely concerned with the Midgard architecture applied by ARM. The current case is said to bear strong resemblance to a case Nvidia filed against Samsung and Qualcomm in 2014, which it ultimately lost. It is not clear when the USITC will reach a conclusion in the AMD case. The committee’s investigations often last longer than a year.