Marvell agrees to pay record-breaking $750M to university to end patent lawsuit

In what appears to be the second-largest payment ever over technology patents, Marvell Technology has agreed to pay Carnegie Mellon University $750 million to end a patent infringement case.

After a massive win at the district court level, CMU was on track to collect as much as $1.54 billion. The university won a $1.17 billion jury verdict in 2012, to which a judge added penalties and interest. But an appeals court cut the win significantly, approving $278 million in damages and ordering other damages issues to be re-tried at the district court level.

Rather than further litigate the case, the two sides reached the deal for the $750 million payment, which was announced late yesterday.

CMU said in a statement that a "substantial share" of the proceeds will go to the two named inventors on the patents, José Moura and Aleksandar Kavcic. Moura is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Kavcic is a former doctoral student of his, now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Hawaii.

Full story can be found in Ars Technica.