duckass%whitney@Sun.COM (David Chenevert) (06/28/88)
N.Y. Times, Saturday, June 25, 1988
I.B.M. Challenging Its Competitors' Use Of Key Technology
The International Business Machines Corporation has begun
warning its competitors that it thinks they are infringing on
patents for the hottest new technology in computer design.
By challenging its competitors, the world's largest computer
maker is trying to assert the right to a technology that engineers
think will dramatically improve tomorrow's computers -- ones that will
be small and low-priced yet have much of the power of today's largest
mainframe machines. If I.B.M. is successful, it could make it harder
for other major computer and semiconductor makers to shift the balance
of power in the industry in their direction, analysts said.
The new technology, on which I.B.M. was a pioneer, is
called RISC, short for reduced instruction set computer.
Other manufacturers of RISC microprocessors and computers said they
were surprised by the I.B.M. move, and several industry executives said
they were not sure that the computer maker could fairly claim patent
infringement. Among the dozens of competitors who are staking their
futures on RISC are Sun Microsystems Inc., the Xerox Corporation, the
Unisys Corporation and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
I.B.M., which took the step after a wide-ranging review of its
patents completed in April, said it hoped to increase revenue by
licensing all of its technology, including RISC.
"We are in the process of approaching companies where we think
there may be an area of potential infringement or where we are
suggesting that they wish to consider licensing some of our patents,"
said Jack D. Kuehler, I.B.M.'s vice chairman and the company's
highest-ranking engineers [sic].
Immediately after the April review I.B.M. said it would permit
competitors to license patents protecting its new PS/2 line of personal
computers. But those competitors would also have to agree to the
retroactive acquisition of licenses for other patents that protect the
popular I.B.M. person computer line introduced in 1981.
Previously, I.B.M. has had cross-licensing agreements with many
large computer companies. As a result, the company has not
aggressively policed the use of its patents by other companies. The
April move is now seen by industry analysts as the first step in the
new patent policy.
Patents In Many Areas
Mr. Kuehler declined to say in what areas the company might move
next. However, I.B.M. holds patents in several areas, from computer
data storage technology to sophisticated software organizers known as
relational data bases. The company also has a patent in word
processing.
I.B.M. declined to state which companies it had approached about in
infringing on the company's RISC technology.
Officials at the Mips Computer Company, a Sunnyvale, Calif., maker
of a RISC computer, said that they had not been contacted by I.B.M.
They noted that the company had conducted extensive research into
patents in the RISC field when it was founded in 1985.
"It's not clear to me what they could claim that could affect the
technology we've done," said John Hennessy, Mips's chief scientist and
a faculty member at Stanford University. "It might be other companies'
machines that have difficulties. I think we can trace every single
thing we've done to work done at Stanford and Berkeley."
He said that Mips had licensed technology that had been developed
by an academic research project at Stanford.
Executives at the Hewlett-Packard Company, Sun Microsystems,
Motorola Inc., Fujitsu America, LSI Logic Inc., Advance [sic] Micro
Devices Inc. and the Cypress Semiconductor Corporation -- all makers
of RISC computers or microprocessors -- said that they had not been
contacted by I.B.M.
I.B.M. officials said that they were concerned about the possible
perception that the company was attempting to steamroller the computer
industry. But they stressed that events in the past year had led them
to a commitment to re-evaluate the company's entire patent portfolio.
"We have a much greater awareness of the need to protect our
intellectual property and to recover appropriate value for it," Mr.
Kuehler said. "We spend a lot of money and people's time developing
our technology."
The company has more than 9,000 United States patents and more than
23,000 related patents around the world.
The RISC computer design concept involves radically streamlining
the microprocessor, the heart of the personal computer and the driving
force behind the modern computer industry. The new design approach
eliminates many of the instructions for handling data built into the
microprocessor and instead processes data by performing simpler steps
repeatedly at faster speeds.
Research into RISC was originally conducted during the mid-1970's
by John Cocke, an I.B.M. computer scientist at the company's Thomas J.
Watson laboratory in the Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Mr. Cocke's group
developed a prototype machine called the 801 Minicomputer that was
completed in 1980.
In the early 1980's a number of academic researchers at
institutions like the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford
pursued independent RISC projects that led to commercial RISC chips.
In fact, the Berkeley researchers coined the term RISC. More
recently, virtually every major computer maker has introduced a
RISC-based computer or announced plans to develop a system based on a
RISC chip developed by a major semiconductor vendor.
The rush to RISC foreshadows a major change in the computer
industry. Modern chips are becoming so complex that the distinction
between semiconductor makers and computer makers is beginning to
disappear.
"Over the next decade what you'll is an abrupt move out of the
specialized computer room and onto the desk that will be based on the
newest generation of RISC," said John East, a senior vice president at
Advanced Micro Devices, a Sunnyvale, Calif., semiconductor maker.
"RISC will be so close to the power of a mainframe that people won't
want the extra cost and aggravation of a specialized computer room."
I.B.M. executives dispute this view. They think that the rise of
the RISC microprocessor will instead increase the growth rate of
mainframe computers that will serve as the center of elaborate
distributed computing centers. The increased power available on the
desktop will be saked up in increasingly exotic ways like voice
recognition and speech synthesis, Mr. Kuehler said.
Impact of I.B.M. Move
Analysts said that I.B.M.'s decision to pursue patent protection
may have an impact on the leading RISC makers.
"It will change the basis of the RISC business, and Sun must be
quaking in its boots," said Stewart Alsop, publisher of P.C. Letter,
an industry newsletter. "I doubt that I.B.M. had made a strategic
decision to go after Sun, but the end result is that it ends up
affecting Sun because they have been the only one who has been
successful in commercially establishing RISC."
Sun recently introduced an advanced RISC microprocessor and
licensed it to a number of chip makers. The Sun design, called SPARC,
has been adopted by major computer makers including Xerox, Unisys, and
A.T.&T.
I.B.M. said that the company now holds more than a dozen patents
covering RISC design and has applied for more than a hundred more, Mr.
Kuehler said.
Mr. Kuehler said the company has continued to invest heavily in
RISC research and has made progress toward developing a
second-generation RISC technology. The company's first commercial
RISC-based work station [sic], the I.B.M. PC RT, has been a commercial
disappointment. However, the company is expected to introduce more
powerful RISC work stations [sic] later this year.