Newport Beach-based Conexant Systems Inc. said it reached a settlement agreement this month with Stanford University professor Brent Townshend in his suit over modem chip patents.
While terms of the agreement were not released, Conexant said in its quarterly financial statement last week it was setting aside $35 million in connection with the litigation. A judge still needs to OK the settlement.
“The agreement could be that or it might be less than that,” said Scott Allen, a Conexant spokesman. “We’ve been engaged with Mr. Townshend in terms of trying to settle this matter and put it behind us.”
Townshend, a consulting associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, has been called a “pioneer” of modem technology. He also has founded a company called Ordinate Corp., which has developed a spoken English test to evaluate the conversational English fluency of foreign students applying for U.S. colleges.
When Townshend filed the lawsuit against Conexant’s predecessor Rockwell Semiconductor Systems in 1997, the company called it “frivolous.”
Townshend also filed a lawsuit against Conexant rival 3Com Corp. When that lawsuit was settled last year, Townshend reacquired the patents in question, while 3Com retained a non-exclusive license to his inventions.
While no dollar amount was disclosed, that settlement revealed the strength of Townshend’s claim.
“Dr. Townshend’s pioneering work is basic to the technology that made the V.90 standard and 56kbps modems possible,” acknowledged Robert C. Suffern, vice president of research and development in the personal communications division at 3Com, according to a press release at the time of the settlement. “His invention dramatically altered the landscape of modem communications and analog modem connection speeds.”
Earlier this year, a California judge awarded Conexant $250,000 for what he saw as frivolous continuation of a patent-infringement suit against Conexant by San Francisco engineer Klaus Holtz and his company, Omni Dimensional Networks. n
