Again today, we see that companies that can’t make technical advances choose the road of the lawsuit, and for many, it has worked well.

Transmeta, a company that used to have some innovative stuff, has been almost off the radar completely for a number of years. Last year, the company decided that Intel was a little fatter than it need be, and so decided to go after some of the cash it needed so badly.

Apparently, Intel was more than a little familiar with the power saving secrets of Transmeta, as the company decided to settle out of court for $150 million dollars right away, and another $100 million over the next five years.

Not only does the settlement guarantee at least partial health for Transmeta for the next 60 months, it also garnered them a collaboration deal with Intel, which will surely make the coffers fuller.

from BetaNews

The technology in question was originally called LongRun, and it made its first appearance in 1999 as the underlying power management mechanism behind a CPU designed to go up against Pentium in mobile systems. At that time, overheating was not so much a battery problem as an issue that struck at the very heart of Intel’s designs on the mobile computer space: Pentium CPUs were generally too hot for mobile systems.

So when Intel unveiled its own power management technology shortly thereafter, some said it bore some resemblance to LongRun. Some said it bore a whole lot of resemblance to LongRun, but not many challenges were issued beyond the relative safety of the trade press.

Last October is when Transmeta decided to file the suit, and soon after Intel filed a countersuit, which should have meant the courts were in for a long tie-up. Cooler heads at Intel must have prevailed, and so now the companies can play nicely together.

further from the article

“Intel believes this agreement is consistent with our long stand practice of licensing technology in exchange for fair value,” Mulloy told BetaNews. “As you know we are very interested in power management technology from a strategic point of view, and we will put this technology into the mix with other programs we have under way.”

Now Intel will have perpetual license not only to the technology it was already using in Pentium III and Pentium 4, but to the LongRun2 technology that Transmeta has already been licensing to AMD. Transmeta describes LongRun2 as “a suite of advanced power management, leakage control and process compensation technologies that can diminish the negative effects of increasing leakage power and process variations in advanced nanoscale designs.”

It will be interesting to see if Transmeta sits on its windfall, or tries once again to do something to increase the collective knowledge in the computer world.

-

[tags] Transmeta, Intel, intellectual property, LongRun, LongRun2 [/tags]