Samsung Electronics has accused Nvidia of infringing its patents in an apparent response to a September action by Nvidia that accused the South Korean company and Qualcomm of infringing patents related to its GPU technology.
The complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria division, charges Nvidia with infringing on six of its patents, with Nvidia customer, computer maker Velocity Micro, accused of infringing eight patents.
The patents listed by Samsung include chip design patents as well as patents for other technologies such as a method for reducing the booting time for a computer.
Nvidia has also been charged with false advertising for its claim that the "Shield" tablet has the world's fastest mobile processor, the Tegra K1. Samsung claims its own Exynos 5433 processor and Apple's A8X are faster.
Nvidia filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm in September with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court in Delaware. It charged Samsung and Qualcomm of allegedly infringing seven of its patents related to GPUs, and asked the ITC to block shipments of Samsung's Galaxy phones and tablets that contain Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali or Imagination's PowerVR graphics architectures.
In a blog post Tuesday, Nvidia said that after it filed the complaints, it expected to be sued in response. "It's a predictable tactic," it added.
The chip company said it wasn't ready yet to respond formally to Samsung's lawsuit, but still cited internal benchmarks to support its claim that the Shield is a better performer than Samsung's Galaxy Note 4.
Samsung has asked the Virginia court for a jury trial and damages for the alleged infringement.
John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com