INDUSTRY

Time is running out for Intel as a U.S. District Court judge delayed an injunction against Intel's Itanium chips. Judge T. John Ward of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, in Marshall, Texas said two patents held by Huntsville, Ala.-based Intergraph are valid and told Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel that it must stop making its Itanium chips. Ward cited nine separate cases of infringement. However, the judge immediately held the injunction until November 29 to give Intel a chance to appeal. Intel officials Thursday said they would. The case stems from a 1997 lawsuit in which Intergraph claimed Intel began making unreasonable demands on its Clipper technology for royalty-free rights to Intergraph patents already being used in Intel Itanium microprocessors. The lawsuit charged Intel with illegal coercive behavior, patent infringement, and antitrust violations. That suit is centered on Intergraph's parallel instruction computing (PIC) technology, which the company said it developed in 1992 when the company's Advanced Processor Division was designing Intergraph's next generation C5 Clipper microprocessor. The company says the PIC technology is an essential component of Intel's IA-64 EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) architecture, which is at the heart of Intel's new Itanium chip. The patents, which Intergraph filed for in 1993, cover techniques for conveying compiler-recognized parallelism to the hardware and a novel approach to routing instructions to any of the processing units. On October 11, Judge Ward ruled in favor of Intergraph. The two companies negotiated a deal in which Intel would pay Intergraph $150 million if it lost a motion for reconsideration, which it did last week. If Intel wins the appeal, it won't get the $150 million back, but it won't have to pay Intergraph any more fees and won't be barred from shipping Itanium chips. If Intel loses the November 29 appeal, the company will pay an additional $100 million to Intergraph to license the technology. Intel and Intergraph said they could still negotiate a license on the patents.