Apple’s custom built A4 and A5 processors are the latest target in yet another patent violation lawsuit filed against Cupertino, this time by Taiwanese company VIA technologies.
VIA seeks a jury trial and an order prohibiting Apple from selling products containing its ARM-based A4 and A5 based SoCs in a complaint filed yesterday in a Wilmington, Delaware federal court.
It’s not entirely clear why VIA thinks the A4 and A5 violate its three cited US patents , only that those patents surround technology for microprocessors used in mobile devices like smartphones and tbalet computers.
“The products at issue generally concern microprocessors included in a variety of electronic products such as certain smartphones, tablet computers, portable media players and other computing devices,” Via said in the complaint.
If that’s all there is to it, sounds pretty bogus to me: I’m hard pressed to see how VIA could have patented the very idea of putting a computer chip in a mobile device. I guess we’ll know soon how this shakes out.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
7 responses to “Apple Accused Of Ripping Off VIA Technologies for the A4 And A5 Chips”
You know you’ve made it to the top when every jerk wants a piece of your ass literly.
HTC pretty much owns Via so this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given the current litigation between Apple & HTC.
Maybe they just want to know what Apple has done inside their chips so they can copy it.
You could have done some investigation instead of blindly reporting this as if VIA is some patent troll. There are three patents cited in the suit, one of which relates to casting integers to floats in the processor’s registers. This is hardly a trivial or novel invention. This an actual hardware invention, not software. And don’t forget VIA already got an injunction against Apple having something to do with graphics hardware. But then again, you couldn’t even spell tablet correctly so I’m not surprised at your shoddy reporting in general.