Lenovo (United States) Inc., part of the global technology corporation, Lenovo Group, filed a patent infringement action on November 15th with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) against ASUSTeK Computer Inc. and ASUS Computer International (ASUS) for infringement of a variety of Lenovo's patents related to software, hardware, and connectivity across multiple ASUS products. The action is in response to ASUS's August 2023 filings in the Regional Court of Munich related to cellular technologies, where Lenovo had offered a cross-licensing deal as a solution.

Lenovo is a strong proponent of cross-licensing agreements, open and transparent negotiations, and licensing within the industry on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. This is evidenced by the Group's ongoing litigation with InterDigital, where it advocated for greater transparency and less discrimination in licensing negotiations and was proven by the UK Court to be a willing licensee. The action against ASUSTeK reflects the Group's commitment to protecting its significant contributions to technology innovation and industry "firsts" over the past 39 years, building a portfolio of over 28,000 patents with a further 14,000 applications pending.

SCUF Gaming, creator of the high-performance gaming controller category, has announced a collaboration with Avenged Sevenfold to celebrate the band's new album, "Life Is But A Dream..." Together, they've created new limited-edition SCUF Instinct Pro and SCUF Reflex FPS controller bundles decked out with the album's instantly recognizable imagery and artwork from renowned artist Wes Lang.

To commemorate "Life Is But A Dream…", Avenged Sevenfold has partnered with SCUF Gaming to drop a pair of exclusive controller bundles. Each jam-packed bundle comes with your choice of a SCUF Instinct Pro or SCUF Reflex FPS controller, an exclusive signed Avenged Sevenfold seven-inch vinyl record, a certificate of authenticity, and passionately crafted packaging, all clad in the band's iconic sepia-toned ink-sketch Wes Lang-painted album artwork. Now, hardcore Avenged Sevenfold fans can rock out in style as they play on a uniquely designed controller that's unmistakably A7X.

British semiconductor specialist firm, Arm Ltd., has has confirmed that it will be offering its clients the option to license "SoC solutions," as opposed to the usual model of paying for intellectual properties. A new Bloomberg article reaffirms previous claims that Arm's engineering department was beavering away on reference chip designs. An IPO filing, registered with the SEC, reveals that various system-on-chip designs are in the pipeline—likely targeting fast-growing tech markets.

An Arm statement explained: "More recently, we have invested in a holistic, solution-focused approach to design, expanding beyond individual design IP elements to providing a more complete system. By delivering SoC solutions optimized for specific use cases, we can ensure that the entire system works together seamlessly to provide maximum performance and efficiency. At the same time, by designing an increasingly greater portion of the overall chip design, we are further reducing incremental development investment and risk borne by our customers while also enabling us to capture more value per device." Arm is probably keen to boost its profit margins, and become more attractive in the eyes of potential investors—lately their designs have been implemented in more expensive product segments, namely automotive, client PCs, and cloud data center solutions.

Rocksmith+ has announced a new partnership with Warner Music Group, to bring even more popular artists to the music-learning service, such as Linkin Park, The Cure, Sepultura, Twisted Sister, and more. "Rocksmith+ has always been about empowering people to learn guitar with their favorite songs," said Jay Cohen, Vice President of Executive Publishing at Ubisoft. "For beginners, guitar players, and music fans this is a great step forward. The large library of songs for learners and players to pick up and play on Rocksmith+ continues to expand every month.

This new partnership with Warner Music Group will help bring both new and established artists to a new and growing audience. We appreciate the progressive approach of our colleagues at WMG, and we look forward to everything we will do together to deliver on the promise of a new music distribution model for all those who make music and the people who love to jam along to it."

China has sharply increased imports of semiconductor manufacturing equipment in recent months, customs data reveals. The country's purchases of chip production tools surged to record highs of nearly $5 billion in June and July, a 70% increase versus the same period last year, which amounted to $2.9 billion. The spike comes right before export restrictions on advanced chipmaking equipment are implemented by the U.S. and its allies. The moves aim to slow China's technological advancement, but Chinese chipmakers are stockpiling to avoid disruptions. Much of the equipment comes from the Netherlands and Japan, which have imposed licensing requirements on certain tool exports. While it's unclear how many are affected, the rush suggests China wants to expand production capacity and buffer against supply chain issues.

Chinese firms like SMIC and YMTC rely heavily on U.S., Dutch, and Japanese suppliers for cutting-edge manufacturing equipment. They are utilizing imported tools to boost the output of mature chips not subject to controls, particularly for electric vehicles, renewable energy, and industrial applications. Significantly, imports from the Netherlands doubled as lithography machines were delivered to Chinese foundries. Purchases from Japan also rose as companies procured etching tools and wafer coaters after 2020 U.S. restrictions. Newly established foundries backed by local governments contributed as Beijing pushed chip production expansions. Despite export control challenges, China aims to keep advancing its semiconductor capabilities. The import spike highlights intensified efforts to build self-sufficiency using older technology not covered by current limits.

Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first to make sure that our understanding of the situation was legally sound. That took some time, which was frustrating to ourselves and to our users, but now we are educated and ready to give an informed response.

We'd like to thank Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law for providing us with legal council for this matter. And to be clear, all of the analysis below is specifically regarding US law. Without further delay, let's begin.

A legal dispute between Realtek and MediaTek has kicked off over Realtek claiming that MediaTek has gotten a third party company to sue Realtek over some unspecified patents involving technology used in smart TVs and set-top boxes. The third party involved goes under the name of IPValue Management Inc and appears to be what is generally known as a patent troll, i.e. a company that buys up patents and uses them to take legal actions against other companies, without actually producing anything related to the patents in question. Realtek claims that MediaTek is conspiring with IPValue to drive Realtek out of the market, leaving Mediatek in a close to monopoly situation in the market.

According to Reuters, Realtek told the publication that it filed the lawsuit against MediaTek to "protect free and fair competition in the industry" and "prevent further harm to the public." Neither MediaTek or IPValue have commented on the lawsuit to the publication. What makes this entire mess even more peculiar, is that MediaTek is said to have a licensing agreement in place with a subsidiary of IPValue called Future Link System LLC, which was signed in 2019. This agreement was brought up by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in a separate lawsuit last year, with the ITC calling it alarming and the court calling it improper. After the ITC criticism last year, Future Link apparently settled with several other companies such as Amlogic, but not with Realtek, which is why the company is now taking things to court. Realtek claims that MediaTek is trying to force any allegedly infringing chips out of the market and trying to make Realtek look like an unreliable partner and supplier to its customers. As such, Realtek wants the court to end the alleged conspiracy and is also asking for damages. Time will tell if Realtek is successful or not, but it seems strange that a patent troll would agree to licence its patents to some parties, but not all, since the only reason for a patent troll to exist is to make money from its patents.

According to a recent news article released by Chinese news group Sina Technology, NetEase has filed a lawsuit against its former publishing partner Blizzard Entertainment, to the tune of (around) $43.5 Million. The Chinese Internet technology company is seeking compensation, in the form of a very large refund, following Blizzard's total exit from the nation's online gaming sector - its server infrastructure in China was shut down in January of this year. The closing of Blizzard-related services represented a very abrupt end to a 14-year long relationship between the two online gaming specialists - press coverage at the time presented a tense situation involving many major disagreements - the partnership was broken because of unfavorable terms on Blizzard's part.

NetEase posits that it had to compensate its customer base through refunds from its own reserves, after the sudden shutdown of Blizzard's hugely popular MMO - World of Warcraft, and other online multiplayer game series including Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo and Starcraft. A significant chunk of the $43.5 million settlement is said to cover the company's cost in refunding part of its customer base - somewhere in the range of 1.12 million players - for discontinued games and services. NetEase is also reported to be seeking damages for broken license agreements, unsold merchandise inventory and the loss of access to future Blizzard intellectual properties.

Update Apr 25th: According to an article from PC Gamer, published today, NetEase is not taking Blizzard to court. It turns out that a serial litigator, Yang Jun, has included NetEase as an appellant in his filed legal documents - under another company name, The9, an apparently defunct former licensing partner. PC Gamer has been informed that Yang Jun has sued NetEase in the past, and that his latest batch of legal documents have been amended to reflect that he is the lone party in demanding a financial settlement from Blizzard.

GlobalFoundries (GF) today sued IBM for trade secret misappropriation. The complaint asserts the former semiconductor manufacturing company has unlawfully disclosed GF's confidential IP and trade secrets, after IBM sold its microelectronics business to GF in 2015. The technology at issue was collaboratively developed, over decades, by the companies in Albany, New York and the sole and exclusive right to license and disclose that technology was transferred to GF upon the sale.

In the legal action filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, GF asserts that IBM unlawfully disclosed GF IP and trade secrets to IBM partners including Intel and Japan's Rapidus, a newly formed advanced logic foundry, and by doing so, IBM is unjustly receiving potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing income and other benefits.

We are pleased to announce our great experiment - Dolphin is coming to Steam! Our store page is now live, and you can visit it with the handy widget below. However, due to how Steam works, you won't be able to download the emulator through Steam just yet. Feel free to wishlist us to be notified when Dolphin is available to download on Steam! Dolphin is an emulator for the big N's 6th and 7th generation consoles, featuring enhancements such as increased resolution, save states, and netplay.

When we launch on Steam, we'll have a feature article detailing the process and features of the Steam release. We're pleased to finally tell the world of our experiment. This has been the product of many months of work, and we look forward to getting it into users' hands soon! You can continue the discussion in the forum thread of this article.

Softbank, the owner of Arm Ltd., is preparing everything it can to ensure a successful initial public offering (IPO) of Arm. However, ahead of the IPO, we have more information about Arm's plans to change its licensing and pricing structures to collect more royalties and ensure higher cash flow for future investors. Currently, Arm licenses technology in the form of intellectual property (IP), usually in different flavors of Cortex-A CPU cores that go inside processors for phones and laptops. Chipmakers that use the IP have additional expenses such as Arm ISA license fee and per-chip royalty, which is based on the chip's average selling price.

However, according to Financial Times, we have a new pricing structure that changes how Arm bills its partners and customers. From now on, Arm will grant licenses to chipmakers and ask them to only ship to device makers with an agreement with Arm. Additionally, these device makers now pay per-device royalty based on the device's average selling price (ASP). This ensures that Arm's fee applies to the higher margin product, which means that ultimately Arm will collect more cash flow from its customers and partners. Currently, the old model charges around 1-2 percents per chip in each smartphone, considering the ASP of smartphone chips to be $40 for Qualcomm, $17 for MediaTek, and $6 for Unisoc. However, taking the ASP of a mobile phone at $335, as recorded in 2022, the fee would be much higher. People familiar with the matter noted that Arm will apply this pricing structure as early as 2024. Apple and Samsung are not impacted by this change, as both companies enjoy their own agreements with Arm.

What can only be summed up as one of the biggest failures when it comes to gaming consoles, the Atari VCS, is coming to an end, as Atari has decided to pull the plug. The company is said to have cancelled all of its "existing VCS manufacturing contracts", which means that after its current stock is sold out, it's unlikely that the company will make any more VCS consoles. The company is offering its current stock at a 20 percent discount, to anyone that would be interested in throwing away their money.

Atari's revenue from sales of the VCS and its accessories dropped from €2.3 million last year, to an abysmal €0.2 million this year, or a drop in revenue of 92 percent based on Atari's latest earnings report. This suggests that the company went from selling around a million units to selling around 10,000 units, based on the retail pricing of the VCS. Atari is apparently planning on launching new games based on its intellectual property, as well as getting into NFTs in the future, in addition to potentially licensing its brand to third parties for new hardware products. It would appear that history is repeating itself when it comes to Atari's success and not in a good way, as the company had a net loss of €5.4 million this year.

MPEG LA, LLC today announced measures to bring its pool license for Versatile Video Coding, or VVC (introduced to the market on January 27, 2022), into conformity with market realities that will free implementers to invest in VVC adoption. First, a waiver of royalties for standalone (not in or with hardware) VVC software products Sold (with or without compensation or consideration) to an End User is available to any VVC Licensee that commits to becoming a Licensor to MPEG LA's VVC License if they or their Affiliates presently or in the future have the right to license or sublicense VVC Essential Patents. Products to which the waiver applies will still benefit from coverage as licensed products under the VVC License.

Second, a 25% VVC royalty discount is available to any VVC Licensee that enters into and is compliant with MPEG LA's AVC Patent Portfolio License, HEVC Patent Portfolio License and VVC Patent Portfolio License.

Over the past few weeks, the legal dispute between Arm Ltd. and Qualcomm Inc. has been warming up the eyes of the entire tech community. However, as per the latest court filing, Arm could change its licensing strategy and shift its whole business model into a new direction that would benefit the company directly. Currently, the company provides the intellectual property (IP) that chip makers can use and add to designs mixed with other IPs and custom in-house solutions. That is how the world of electronics design (EDA) works and how many companies operate. However, in the Qualcomm-Arm legal battle, Qualcomm's counterclaim has brought new light about Arm's plans for licensing its hardware designs past 2024.

According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, who examined court documents, Arm will reportedly change terms to use its IP where the use of other IP mixed with Arm IP is prohibited. If a chip maker plans to use Arm CPU IP, they must also use Arm's GPU/NPU/ISP/DSP IPs. This would result in devices that utilize every design the UK-based designer has to offer, and other IP makers will have to exclude their designs from the SoC. By doing this, Arm directly stands against deals like the Samsung-AMD deal, where AMD provides RDNA GPU IP and would force Samsung to use Arm's Mali GPU IP instead. This change should take effect in 2025 when every new license agreement has to comply with new rules.

According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis sources, Apple is moving its embedded cores from Arm to RISC-V. In Apple's Silicon designs, there are far more cores than the main ones that power the operating system and end-user applications. For example, embedded cores are present, and there are 30+ in M1 SoCs responsible for all kinds of workloads not related to the operating system. These tasks are usually associated with other functions such as WiFi/BlueTooth, ThunderBolt retiming, touchpad control, NAND chips having their own core, etc. They run their own firmware and power everything around the central cores that run the OS, so the whole SoC functions appropriately.

It appears that a lot of these cores are based on Arm M-series or lower-end A-series IP that Apple is currently looking to replace with RISC-V. Given that a large portion of software runs on the main big.LITTLE configuration, other secondary SoC tasks can migrate to a different ISA like RISC-V, with a small firmware adjustment. Given that these cores can be placed with custom IPs, Apple would save licensing fees if custom RISC-V cores were used. Additionally, developing firmware for these cores at an Apple engineering team size shouldn't be a problem. Of course, we have no information about when these custom cores will appear inside Apple Silicon. Even when they are used, no formal announcement is expected given that the main cores remain to be powered by Arm ISA, with everything else invisible to the end-user.

The world of semiconductor IP licensing is complex by nature. If you use a company's IP, you must agree to its licensing terms. Today, it is precisely those terms that are being breached in the event of Arm Ltd. filing a lawsuit against one of its biggest customers, Qualcomm. When Qualcomm acquired Nuvia Inc., regarded as one of the best CPU design teams in the industry, it transferred Arm-Nuvia license agreements as its own. It continued the development of Arm IP under Qualcomm's name. This is a standard restriction, as Arm's licensing prohibits these sorts of IP transfers among companies to protect the IP.

As the UK-headquartered company reports: "Because Qualcomm attempted to transfer Nuvia licenses without Arm's consent, which is a standard restriction under Arm's license agreements, Nuvia's licenses terminated in March 2022. Before and after that date, Arm made multiple good faith efforts to seek a resolution. In contrast, Qualcomm has breached the terms of the Arm license agreement by continuing development under the terminated licenses. Arm was left with no choice other than to bring this claim against Qualcomm and Nuvia to protect our IP, our business, and to ensure customers are able to access valid Arm-based products."

The U.S. Government has imposed restrictions on the export of AI compute GPUs to China and Russia without Government-authorization in the form of a waiver or a license. This impacts sales of products such as the NVIDIA A100, H100; AMD Instinct MI100, MI200; and the upcoming Intel "Ponte Vecchio," among others. The restrictions came to light when NVIDIA on Wednesday disclosed that it has received a Government notification about licensing requirements for export of its AI compute GPUs to Russia and China.

The notification doesn't specify the A100 and H100 by name, but defines AI inference performance thresholds to meet the licensing requirements. The Government wouldn't single out NVIDIA, and so competing products such as the AMD MI200 and the upcoming Intel Xe-HP "Ponte Vecchio" would fall within these restrictions. For NVIDIA, this is impacts $400 million in TAM, unless the Government licenses specific Russian and Chinese customers to purchase these GPUs from NVIDIA. Such trade restrictions usually come with riders to prevent resale or transshipment by companies outside the restricted region (eg: a distributor in a third waived country importing these chips in bulk and reselling them to these countries).

AMD and ATI Technologies ULC have filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) against Realtek Semiconductor and TCL Industries holdings. The complaint lists five patent infringements from both companies, mostly related to graphics technologies such as texture decompression, a unified shader approach to graphics architectures, a multi-threaded graphics processing system, as well as methods to synchronize thread wavefront data and events and a patent covering a processing unit for asynchronous dispatch.

According to AMD, both companies integrated solutions based on AMD's intellectual property without appropriate, prior licensing. The USITC has already come forward with an investigation announcement towards a number of Realtek and TCL-designed products, including graphics systems, digital televisions, and assorted components, found in some products shipped and sold in the U.S. market. The lawsuit aims for an exclusion order and cease and desist on sales of affected products.

According to the report from Reuters, SoftBank has managed to regain control of the Arm China branch office that went rogue under the chairman and CEO Allen Wu's leadership. Arm China is SoftBank's venture to operate Arm Ltd. business in the Chinese region. That means that Arm can use all the licensing and development done on the mainland with SoftBank's supervision and conduct business. However, that idea was tough to pull off when now ex-chairman/CEO Allen Wu decided not to give up his leadership role for almost two years, despite being fired in 2020.

Not everything is terrible, as the SoftBank operation managed to make some progress in getting back the control of the Arm China venture. The company reports that the Arm China board has voted to replace Allen Wu unanimously and appoint Dr. Renchen Liu alongside Eric Chen as two co-CEOs. Dr. Liu is a vice dean at the Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen, and the agency in Shenzhen has registered him as the company leader and general manager. Eric Chen is a managing partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund, helping Dr. Liu with business operations. Later after this decision, Allen Wu posted a letter signed by 430 employees that stated that there were law enforcement errors in his replacement process and that he would continue to lead the company. It is a matter of time before Chinese authorities take this action a step further and see more details.

OFF Global today announces a licensing agreement with Nokia for the design and sale of laptops. The new French technology company holds an international exclusive licence to create Nokia-branded laptops.

OFF Global also unveils the Nokia PureBook Pro, the first laptop in the Nokia PureBook range, designed and developed under the Nokia brand. With a Full HD screen, a 12th generation Intel i3 processor and a sleek design, the Nokia PureBook Pro is a computer suited to both personal and professional users looking for an easy-to-use device, with no compromise on performance or price.

As a true hybrid device, the Nokia PureBook Pro is a versatile laptop that seamlessly blends work, life and entertainment needs, with a simple and fluid user experience, available from 699 €.

Arm announced today that its board of directors has appointed 35-year semiconductor industry leader Rene Haas as chief executive officer and member of the board of directors, effective immediately. Mr. Haas succeeds Simon Segars, who has stepped down as chief executive officer and member of the board of directors after 30 years with the company. In the near-term, Mr. Segars will support the leadership transition in an advisory role for Arm.

"Rene is the right leader to accelerate Arm's growth as the company starts making preparations to re-enter the public markets," said Masayoshi Son, Representative Director, Corporate Officer, Chairman & CEO of SoftBank Group Corp. "I would like to thank Simon for his leadership, contributions and dedication to Arm over the past 30 years."

AMD at its Computex event shed some light on its IP partnership with Samsung. We already knew this was going to be a closer collaboration than most IP licensing deals, as AMD themselves announced this would be a semi-custom solution designed between both companies. AMD CEO Lisa Su described the technology to be embedded in the upcoming Samsung Exynos SoC as being based on RDNA2 - but this likely is just a marketing and clarity perspective on AMD's technology being implemented, since between the design of RDNA2 and the announcement of the Samsung partnership a lot of water has necessarily run under AMD's graphics IP bridge.

Lisa Su did however confirm that two key RDNA2 technologies will find their way into Samsung's Exynos: Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and Raytracing. This isn't he first time VRS has made an appearance on a mobile SoC - it's already been implemented by Qualcomm in the Adreno 660 GPU (part of the Snapdragon 888 SoC design). However, Raytracing does seem to be a first for the SoC market, and Samsung might just edge out competition in its time to market with this technology. more details will certainly be shared as we get closer to the fabled AMD-partnered Exynos release.

The demands of data center workloads and internet traffic are growing exponentially, and new solutions are needed to keep up with these demands while reducing the current and anticipated growth of power consumption. But the variety of workloads and applications being run today means the traditional one-size-fits all approach to computing is not the answer. The industry demands flexibility; design freedom to achieve the right level of compute for the right application.

As Moore's Law comes to an end, solution providers are seeking specialized processing. Enabling specialized processing has been a focal point since the inception of our Neoverse line of platforms, and we expect these latest additions to accelerate this trend.

DIALOG SEMICONDUCTOR, a leading provider of battery and power management, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and Industrial edge computing solutions and GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the world's leading specialty foundry, today announced that they have entered into an agreement in which Dialog licenses its Conductive Bridging RAM (CBRAM) technology to GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The resistive ram (ReRAM)-based technology was pioneered by Adesto Technologies which was recently acquired by Dialog Semiconductor in 2020. GLOBALFOUNDRIES will first offer Dialog's CBRAM as an embedded, non-volatile memory (NVM) option on its 22FDX platform, with the plan to extend to other platforms.

Dialog's proprietary and production proven CBRAM technology is a low power NVM solution designed to enable a range of applications from IoT and 5G connectivity to artificial intelligence (AI). Low power consumption, high read/write speeds, reduced manufacturing costs and tolerance for harsh environments make CBRAM particularly suitable for consumer, medical, and select industrial and automotive applications. Furthermore, CBRAM technology enables cost-effective embedded NVM for advanced technology nodes required for products in these markets.

NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) today announced a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Arm Limited from SBG and the SoftBank Vision Fund (together, "SoftBank") in a transaction valued at $40 billion. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin and non-GAAP earnings per share.

The combination brings together NVIDIA's leading AI computing platform with Arm's vast ecosystem to create the premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence, accelerating innovation while expanding into large, high-growth markets. SoftBank will remain committed to Arm's long-term success through its ownership stake in NVIDIA, expected to be under 10 percent.