VIA Says Asus Stole Its Trade Secrets

[therealduckofdeath]

+k

 

[stevelord]

VIA? Wow I haven't heard from them in a long time. I remember a decade ago when they were one of the leaders in mobo chipsets.

 

[therealduckofdeath]

VIA? Wow I haven't heard from them in a long time. I remember a decade ago when they were one of the leaders in mobo chipsets.

Yeah, Intel and AMD sort of squeezed out 3rd party options around ten years ago. I remember having a couple of VIA-based mobo's for AMD processors in the 90's. Back then they were a really great alternative.

 

[rwinches]

The employees left the company enmass so there had to be a reason.
They name the individuals so this sounds like bad blood revenge.

Asus is a top-notch company and could have easily done the development, so if thats the basis of the lawsuit it has no merit. That would be a very long stretch to say that quickness to market proves IP was stolen.

It is always a very bad sign when companies start lawsuits years after the fact, you know so the damage award is bigger like say SCO and their IP claims.

This is different that cases where companies do joint ventures and make claims.

 

[artk2219]

When you post all of that... you forget that in China, they can make FAKE iPhones and other products within days.

USB 2.0 has been around for 10+ years. USB 3 is only 2 years old (mainstream)... the departure of VIA "talent" was in 2007... long before there was any USB 3 controllers.

- Does VIA make USB 3 controllers today? If so and its of poor quality, isn't that VIA's fault?

VIA *DID* make some good stuff, it was intel's mis-steps that catapult VIA with the crappy i820 boards with the MTH debacle. Then VIA got quite good making AMD chipsets... until nForce2 came out... then VIA started dying. Bought what was left of Cyrix to make their own CPUs.

It'll be interesting to see how nVidia will do in the future as PC gaming dwindles, no console GPUs and of course no chipsets.

The fake crap coming out of China uses commercially available components slapped together in a package meant to look like another popular product. That's not at all comparable to designing a whole new ASIC. I'm sure that they would love to fake i7s if they could get their hands on the IP needed to do so.

The USB 3.0 specification was finalized in late 2008, yet work was being done on it long before that. It's not at all uncommon for manufacturers to release products before a specification is finalized; see 802.11n and 802.11ac for examples.

USB 3.0 is vastly different than USB 2.0 but it is not so different that a good quantity of USB 2.0 IP would be useless.

I'm not picking a side here, just pointing out that their complaint may have merit.

I would love to see a company fake an I7, id be absolutely amazed if they could do it. Even with all of the IP they would have to work on a process that the chip wasn't designed for and figure out everything else associated with it. Hell by the end of it they'd have spent enough time and money to have designed their own new chip from scratch. Even copying an older atom or brazos would be incredibly impressive, all of those chips are incredibly complicated and difficult to reproduce.

 

[coolitic]

Well this should be interesting. I personally dont take sides here till proof shows up.

 

[palladin9479]

Pinheld makes a very good point guys. Designing an ASIC isn't as simple as plugging in a standard and *poof*. It's a long complicated process where your designing the physical gates and circuitry. It's the process and design templates that are protected by law, not the standard itself. A company hires a bunch of staff from another company and suddenly *poof* a functioning product appears in short order that resembles the previous companies product, that's pretty solid grounds for a case. You can't take documents and engineering diagrams from one company to another.