Huawei has sued Taiwan-based mobile chip developer MediaTek for alleged patent infringement.
The lawsuit was filed in a local Chinese court after negotiations between the two companies around patent fees reportedly broke down.
According to a report from Chinese news outlet YiCai, the patents Huawei is suing MediaTek for relate to cellular technologies, including 3G, 4G, and 5G. A source told the outlet that talks were opened several years ago but discussions have since broken down and no resolution has been met.
In response to YiCai’s request for comment, MediaTek said the lawsuit has no significant impact on the company but would not comment further on proceedings.
No further details on the lawsuit, including the scale of the damages Huawei is seeking, have been made public.
Citing an unnamed source familiar with the situation, Nikkei Asia reported that Huawei has filed the patent infringement lawsuit primarily to collect royalty fees so that it can keep investing in research and development. The news outlet estimates that around 200 companies currently pay royalties to Huawei.
However, a second unnamed source claimed other organizations had been hit with similar lawsuits from Huawei, as the company attempts to reverse the financial decline in its smartphone business resulting from US export controls.
Huawei told DCD it was not currently commenting on the issue. MediaTek has yet to respond.
A number of tech companies have found themselves in court on patent infringement charges in recent months.
In January, Google settled a $1.67bn TPU patent infringement case with Singular Computing; while April saw AWS ordered to pay $525m in damages to storage and data management company Kove, and HPE filed a lawsuit against Inspur alleging patent infringement and deceptive business practices.
Last month, German high-performance computing (HPC) vendor ParTec filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, with the company alleging the tech giant violated three of ParTec’s patents when the tech giant built its Azure AI platform.
Also in June, Mimir IP sued Micron, alleging patent infringement over patents purchased from SK Hynix relating to voltage measurement devices and non-volatile memory devices.
