What’s AMD after with Its Patent Lawsuits?

AMD eyes licensing revenue

In the previous part of the series, we discussed how Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is looking to improve its profits by entering high-end markets and expanding its licensing business. AMD secured a net licensing gain of $31 million in fiscal 4Q16 from its server joint venture with THATIC (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment).

AMD expects to gain $50 million from this licensing in fiscal 2017. It’s also looking to secure more licensing deals in 2017 and has filed patent lawsuits for the same.

Details of AMD’s patent lawsuits

In January 2017, AMD filed civil lawsuits against LG, Vizio, MediaTek, and Sigma Designs for infringing three generic-looking graphics patents owned by ATI which AMD acquired in 2006. The three patents relate to GPU (graphics processing unit) architecture, unified shaders, and parallel pipeline graphics.

AMD claims that the above four companies are using its technologies in the following products:

  • MediaTek’s Helio P10 SoC (system on chip) features the Mali T860MP2 GPU it licensed from ARM. This SoC is used in some of LG’s smartphone models.
  • Sigma’s SX7 SoC features an ARM-developed quad-cluster GPU. This SoC is used in Vizio’s advanced TVs.

Read full – http://marketrealist.com/2017/02/whats-amd-after-with-its-patent-lawsuits/