IP Firm Sues Over Core Products from Dell, Acer, Asus

A patent licensing company has hit Acer, Gateway, Acer as well as Dell with a patent infringement lawsuit that targets most of their product offerings.

In three separate filings, Round Rock Research claims that Acer, Gateway and Dell are violating eight of its patents, while Asus is infringing on nine.

All patents appear to have been acquired by Round Rock Research in a package deal from Micron on December 23, 2009. They range from inventions that were filed with the U.S. Patent Office between 1992 to 2005. The eight patents mentioned in the suit mainly refer to memory and storage technologies and include:

5,255,109: Heat dissipating LCD display

5,781,174: Image synthesizer and image pointing system

5,938,764: Apparatus for improved storage of computer system configuration information

5,991,843: Method and system for concurrent computer transaction processing

6,002,613: Data communication for memory

7,138,823: Method of generating a pulsed output signal from a periodic ramp signal and a reference voltage, and a switch mode power converter

7,285,979: Apparatus and method for independent control of on-die termination for output buffers of a memory device

7,389,369: Active termination control

The ninth patent played against Asus describes a "passivation planarization" technology that refers to a CMOS imaging device with a passivation layer providing a surface for a filter array.

Dell is accused of infringing the patents with its entire product line, including smartphones, tablets, notebooks, desktop and workstation systems computers. The suit targets Acer's H243 LCD, as well as the Aspire and Predator notebooks and Revo and Veriton desktop systems. The affected Asus devices include the VW246H LCD, the Essentio andd Eee desktop computers, all notebooks, T and R series servers and all motherboards manufactured by the company.

Acer, Asus and Dell declined to comment on the suit.