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LONDON ? ARM Holdings plc, a successful licensor of processor-related intellectual property, has said it does not believe it infringes on patents held by Patriot Scientific Corp. and TPL Group in the Moore Microprocessor Patent (MMP) portfolio. The portfolio includes seven U.S. patents, as well as their European and Japanese counterparts, which Patriot (San Diego, Calif,) and TPL Group (Cupertino, Calif.) have said they consider fundamental to the design of modern microprocessors, microcontrollers and system-on-chip devices.
Three of the most significant patents are: U.S. Patent 5,809,336, which covers the separate clocking of a CPU and its I/O; U.S. Patent 6,598,148, which covers the use of multiple cores and embedded memory; and U.S. Patent 5,784,584, which covers fetching multiple instructions. Patriot and TPL have licensed a number of companies to use the MMP portfolio, most noticeably leading processor vendors Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM (Cambridge, England) confirmed that ARM had investigated the patents and had concluded that it does not infringe any of them.
When that position was put to East he said: Thats right. With reference to Patriot and TPL Group East told EE Times Europe: We are well aware of what they are doing. We dont think it poses a problem for ARM,
AMD was the first company to license the MMP portfolio in February 2005. Terms of the licensing deal were undisclosed at the time, although AMD did announce it had taken an undisclosed stake in Patriot Scientific. Intel licensed the MMP portfolio in July 2005 and Hewlett Packard Company signed up in January 2006. Again, terms were not disclosed at the time. Patriot Scientific revealed subsequently that semiconductor makers like Intel Corp. and AMD are not being required to pay royalties on MMP licenses.
Since then MMP has enjoyed success signing up Japanese computer and equipment companies. Signatories include Fujitsu, Sony, Casio and Nikon.
The MMP portfolio is managed by Alliacense on behalf of the joint owners, privately held TPL Group and the publicly held Patriot Scientific, under a scheme that rewards first movers in their industry sectors with discounts. The MMP portfolio is named after inventor Charles H. Moore, chief technology officer of TPL Group, who is credited with inventing the Forth software programming language and is known for his work in the 1980s on stack-based microprocessors.
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