A company called Nazomi Communications has sued a number of large companies for breaching patents it owns on hardware acceleration.
Nazomi filed suit on December 7 in a Texas district court against Nokia, Microsoft, Amazon, Western Digital, Garmin Corporation, Sling Media, Vizio and Iomega.
In its filing Nazomi said it was formed in September 1998 by three Java veterans to improve the performance of applications that run on the Java platform and other runtime platforms. Its technologies include the Jstar Java Coprocessor and the JA108 Java and Multimedia Application Processor.
These technologies, said Nazomi, have been incorporated intomillions of smartphones.
It owns US patent 7,080,362 – Java virtual machine hardware for RISC and CISC processors, and US patent 7,225,436 – Java hardware accelerator using microcode engine.
Nokia’s 770 internet tablet uses an ARM926TEJ processor core, Microsoft’s Zune uses an ARM1136-JFS processor, AMazon’s Kindle 2 eReader uses the same ARM chip.
Western Digital, Garmin, Sling, Vizo and Iomega all use ARM processors – all of these companies and those above are capable of Java hardware acceleration.
Nazomi contends that devices manufactured and sold by these companies infringe on its own patents, so it is seeking damages and a jury trial.
