A summary Of The Controversy
HDC and Intel are not strangers. In fact, the controversy between the parties has been
Ongoing for nearly a decade. In November 2010, after realizing that Intel had obtained a
Patent, on a learning machine technology (SVM-RFE) that HDC already owned and
patented, HDC sought to provoke an interference with Intel’s Patent No. 7,685,077
(“Intel’s ‘077 patent”). On October 3, 2011, HDC filed for re-examination of Intel’s ‘077
patent. HDC also later successfully provoked the interference before the Patent Trial and
Appeal Board (PTAB)between Intel’s ‘077 patent and HDC’s then-pending application
directed towards the same SVM-RFE technology. On November 10, 2011, HDC sent a
letter to counsel for Intel, advising it of the reexamination and potential interference
proceedings, and offering Intel the opportunity to license the HDC patents. In December
2011, counsel for Intel responded to HDC’s letter, stating that Intel would likely not fight
the patent office proceedings unless Intel was using the SVM-RFE technology. Intel did
fight, and thus began a 9-year battle including a three-year interference proceeding during
which Intel implemented a scorched-earth strategy, first attempting to claim it was the
rightful owner of the SVM-RFE technology at issue, but in the event that failed (which it
ultimately did), Intel also tried to invalidate all of the HDC patents-in-suit, as well as
sacrifice its own ‘077 patent in the process, seemingly to continue using the SVM-RFE
technology. Ultimately, HDC won the interference proceeding, and Intel’s ‘077 patent was
cancelled. During this lengthy exchange with the PTAB, not once did Intel expressly deny
using the patented technology. Rather its actions in fighting HDC in the Patent Office for
nearly a decade, and its willingnessto invalidate its own patent in exchange for the PTO
invalidating the HDC patents, demonstrate that the opposite is true, and that Intel has and
continues to use the SVM-RFE technology –a technology patented and owned by HDC.
A more detailed timeline of the parties’ interactions and communications is presented in
HDC’s Support Vector Machine-Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) is an
Important technology that is utilized across a broad spectrum of applications (e.g.,
artificial intelligence, drug discovery, healthcare, economics, coding, data collection and
data mining, etc.) and is widely used today. SVM-RFE uses learning machines (e.g.,
Support Vector Machines-SVM) to identify relevant patterns in datasets, and more
specifically, selects features within the datasets that best enable classification of the data
(e.g., Recursive Feature Elimination-RFE). As of the date of this complaint, the academic
paper that first described HDC’s SVM-RFE technology (discussed in greater detail below)
has been cited at least 8,098 times across numerous academic and industry mediums
(books, journals, reports, patents, etc.), including at least 378times in 2020 alone (and
counting). Defendant Intel, itself, seems to concede that SVM-RFE is important, as it
attempted to patent it for itself –its ‘077 patent –and fought to either keep its ‘077 patent
or otherwise destroy all SVM-RFE related patents. As explained below, Intel has itself
published numerous technical articles admitting that it has used the SVM-RFE technology
in designing and optimizing certain of its microprocessor lines. Given the widespread and
continuing use of the SVM-RFE technology by potential customers of Intel, there is no
reason to believe Intel has stopped using the technology. In fact, the widespread use of
SVM-RFE would require Intel to continue to conduct SVM-RFE testing, validation and
verification tasks, to ensure their processors and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
products can successfully run the SVM- RFE processes required by their customers.
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