An Astounding Lawsuit for Marvell
On December 27th, Marvell (MRVL) announced a $1.2 billion loss to Carnegie Mellon University in a patent lawsuit. Since October, I have paid for access to the court docket and have read every document available in the docket (some of the documents are available here free of charge). The $1.2 billion award seems astounding, but the patents in question go to the core of Marvell's multi-billion dollar HD controller business. The CMU patents relate to error-correcting codes for magnetic media, and are presumably what allows Marvell to achieve the high gigabyte-per-platter density frequently touted during their conference calls.
In winning the award, CMU successfully argued that not only were...