A federal jury in Texas found Intel guilty of VLSI Technology’s patent infringement and awarded the injured party $948.8 million in damages, Reuters reported.

It is emphasized that Intel violated the VLSI patent on “acceleration of data processing” when designing Skylake generation processors. At the hearing, VLSI’s attorney stated that Intel processors are committing “millions and millions of breaches per second” in this way.

In response, the defense expressed its unequivocal disagreement with the decision and its intention to appeal. According to Intel lawyers, the company’s engineers independently developed these processors from scratch. And they argue that the use of VLSI technology is basically impossible because of its irrelevance.

It is noteworthy that, despite the fact that VLSI Technology is associated with the SoftBank Group holding, its actions are a textbook example of the behavior of so-called patent trolls. The fact is that the patent that became the subject of the dispute is not the development of VLSI Technology – it was purchased from the Dutch semiconductor company NXP Semiconductors NV.

Reuters writes that VLSI Technology was not the first to attack Intel. In March last year, the firm secured a settlement of approximately $2.2 billion to Intel, and two more lawsuits regarding other VLSI patents are pending.