Broadcom granted permanent injunction

The United States District Court for the Central District of California issued a decision granting Broadcom's request for a permanent injunction against certain products of Emulex Corporation previously found to infringe two Broadcom patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 7,058,150 and 7,471,691. "We are pleased with the Court's decision," said Art Chong, Broadcom's Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. "The Court's decision recognizes the important principle that Broadcom should not have to compete against its own patents. Broadcom will continue to vigorously protect its intellectual property rights, including seeking permanent injunctions against its competitors' sale of infringing products where appropriate." The '150 Patent describes and claims the use of a phase interpolator to optimize clock and data recovery in a high speed chip, and is an important technology for achieving reliable performance in high speed data communications chips. The '691 Patent describes and claims techniques used in Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop networking. The enjoined products include Emulex's BladeEngine 2 (BE2), BladeEngine 3 (BE3) and Lancer (XE201) chips and certain of Emulex's Fibre Channel switch products. The BE2 and BE3 are 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers, which are sold as stand-alone chips and used in Emulex's OneConnect™ Converged Network Adapters. Lancer (XE201) is currently used in some of Emulex's Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA) products. The permanent injunction will prohibit Emulex from importing, manufacturing, using and selling the enjoined products in the United States and from assisting others in doing the same. The injunction is subject to a "sunset" period. For the '150 patent, the sunset started on October 12, 2011 and will run until April 12, 2013. For the '691 patent, the sunset started on December 16, 2011 and will run until June 16, 2013. During the sunset period, Emulex will be permitted to continue certain sales of enjoined products, but only for use in customer devices for which the customer had placed a firm order for production quantities of affected Emulex products prior to the start of the sunset period. During the sunset period, Emulex will be required to pay Broadcom a royalty of 9 percent on those sales. Emulex also will be prohibited from competing for new design-wins with the enjoined products.