MicroUnity accused Apple in patent violations

California-based company MicroUnity System Engineering filed a lawsuit against Apple, Acer, HTC, LG, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Samsung, Spring, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and AT&T. It accuses these companies in infringement of 14(!) separate patents about mobile processors.

The lawsuit was filed few days ago in a District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a place where patent complaints are filed commonly in hopes to get a favorable outcome. The devices named in the document are iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch (32 Gb and 64 Gb versions), Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Nokia N900.

The patents that were named in the suit are listed below:

• "System for Placing Entries of an Outstanding Processor Request into a Free Pool After the Request Is Accepted by a Corresponding Peripheral Device." (No. 5,737,547)
• "General Purpose, Multiple Precision Parallel Operation, Programmable Media Processor." (No. 5,742,840 & No. 5,794,061)
• "General Purpose, Dynamic Partitioning, Programmable Media Processor." (No. 6,006,31 C1)
• "Configurable Cache Allowing Cache-Type and Buffer-Type Access." (No. 6,427,190)
• "System with Wide Operand Architecture, and Method." (No. 6,725,356 C1)
• "Programmable Processor and Method for Partitioned Group Element Selection Operation." (No. 7,213,131)
• "Programmable Processor with Group Floating-Point Operations." (7,216,217 B2)
• "Programmable Processor and Method for Partitioned Group Shift." (No. 7,260,708 B2)
• "System and Software for Catenated Group Shift Instruction." (No. 7,353,367 B2)
• "Multiplier Array Processing System with Enhanced Utilization at Lower Precision." (No. 7,509,366 B2)
• "Method and Apparatus for Performing Improved Group Floating-Point Operations." (No. 7,653,806 B2)
• "Method and Software for Partitioned Floating-Point Multiply-Add Operation." (No. 7,660,972 B)
• "System and Apparatus for Group Data Operations." (No. 7,660,973 B2)

Years ago MicroUnity has already experienced suits against Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Sony Computer Entertainment America and Dell.