Intel and Via to battle it out in the courts

Hostilities between Intel and Via have flared up again, with Intel filing a patent-infringement lawsuit against Via.

Intel filed its suit in a US District Court in Delaware, calling for Via's new Pentium 4 chipsets to be pulled off the market.

The lawsuit alleges that Via's P4X266 and P4M266 chipsets, which were released this month, infringe on five Intel patents.

In addition, S3 Graphics has been named as a defendant in the suit. The company is a joint venture created by Via and Sonicblue - a graphics chipmaker turned consumer electronics company - to help develop chipsets.

The chipsets developed by Via, allow PC manufacturers to put DDR DRAM, a high-speed form of standard computer memory, inside computers with Pentium chips.

Only Rambus memory is allowed inside Pentium 4 computers, however chipsets that let PC makes use ordinary SDRAM will be available from today.

Intel filed a similar series of lawsuits against Via in 1999 after the company came out with Pentium III chipsets. The suit was settled in July 2000.

The new lawsuit states that Via does not have a licence to build Pentium 4 chipsets.

However, Intel originally signed a licence with S3 Inc, which merged into Sonicblue. Consequently, Sonicblue and Via created a company in the Cayman Islands called S3 Graphics. Via is said to own roughly half of S3 Graphics and controls its management.

Any settlement is likely to hinge on whether the chipset licence survived the legal transformations, but technology licences cannot be transferred or granted to other parties.