SAN FRANCISCO—A U.S. federal court granted Broadcom Corp.'s request for a permanent injunction against certain Emulex Corp. products previously found to infringe two Broadcom patents.
According to
Broadcom (Irvine, Calif.), the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted the request for injunction against Emulex products found to infringe U.S. patent Nos. 7,058,150 and 7,471,691, both held by Broadcom. The first describes and claims the use of a phase interpolator to optimize clock and data recovery in a high speed chip, while the second describes and claims techniques used in fibre channel arbitrated loop networking, Broadcom said.
Broadcom said the injunction will prohibit Emulex importing, manufacturing, using and selling products found to infringe the patents after 18-month "sunset" periods which run through April 12, 2013 for the '150 patent and June 16, 2013 for the '691 patent. During these periods, Emulex can continue with certain sales of enjoined products, but only for use in customer devices for which the customer had placed a firm order for production quantities of affected Emulex products prior to the start of the sunset period, Broadcom said.
Emulex (Costa Mesa, Calif.) said it would take a charge of about $600,000 to cover liability damages owed to Broadcom. This amount is in addition to another $387,922 that the company previously reported, Emulex said.
Of Emulex's reported sales of $128.7 million for the quarter ended Jan. 1, about $7 million was for products that are impacted by the injunction, Emulex said.
"Emulex is dedicated to protecting the interest of its customers," said Jim McCluney, Emulex CEO, in a statement. "We have been working with our suppliers to implement design changes to the SerDes modules included in the impacted products."
Emulex noted that Broadcom
originally asserted 12 U.S. patents against Emulex, but that the court ruled that the company had infringed only two.
"The court's decision recognizes the important principle that Broadcom should not have to compete against its own patents," said Art Chong, Broadcom's general counsel and corporate secretary, in a statement.