Broadcom Sues Emulex for Patent Infringement

­Having failed in its lengthy attempt to buy Emulex earlier this year, Broadcom has now taken to suing the company for alleged infringement of its patents related to networking and communications technologies.

In its complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Broadcom alleges that Emulex infringes 10 Broadcom patents covering a broad range of high speed data and storage networking technologies, including integrated circuit design, serializer/deserializer (SerDes), TCP offload engine (TOE), remote direct memory access (RDMA), Fibre Channel, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet technologies.

"As we developed our plans for the Fibre Channel over Ethernet market, we discovered that Emulex is infringing multiple Broadcom patents in an effort to use Broadcom technology to compete against both our existing and future products," said David Rosmann, Broadcom's Vice President for Intellectual Property Litigation. "We believe Emulex is infringing a broad range of Broadcom patents; we are concerned that Emulex's infringement is pervasive."

Broadcom is seeking both monetary damages and injunctive relief to stop Emulex's continued infringement.

Earlier this year, Broadcom launched a hostile takeover bid for Emulex, valuing the company at around US$760 million, which was instantly rejected by the company. The acrimonious war of words between the two companies resulted in the takeover bid being dropped in July.

Posted to the site on 15th September 2009