ITC Says SiRF Infringes Six Broadcom Patents

A U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) judge has ruled that certain SiRF Technology products infringe six patents related to improving GPS processing and sensitivity that are held by Global Locate Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Broadcom.

The infringement findings cover a range of SiRF products, including those incorporating the SiRFstarIII and SiRFInstant GPS architectures, according to Broadcom.

The ruling came Friday, August 8, just a day after SiRF said it had asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reexamine four patents that are the subject of an infringement suit Broadcom has brought against SiRF in federal court. Furthermore, In June the ITC rejected claims by SiRF Technology that Global Locate infringed upon two of its patents, and also found that SiRF’s asserted claims on one of the patents at issue were invalid.

The ruling Friday followed a trial earlier this year. Broadcom said it expects a final determination by the full six-person commission by early December.

The six patents that SiRF was found to infringe are U.S. patents 6,417,801; 6,937,187; 6,606,346; 7,158,080; 6,704,651; 6,651,000 — relating to extended ephemeris assistance, calculating time in GPS receivers, enhancing sensitivity in assisted GPS systems, and implementing hardware structures for parallel correlation, according to Broadcom.