Earlier in July 2017 the Patent Trial and Appeal Board before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had ordered unpatentable the relevant claims of US patent US 6,693,557, held by U.S. competitor company Wavetronix.
In the Inter Partes Review, smartmicro has successfully invalidated the key claims of this patent. Competitor had stated that smartmicro technology would infringe such claims - which were now found unpatentable.
smartmicro Managing Director Dr. Ralph Mende commented: “We are happy about this (final) decision. Actually we were never really in doubt that we would be successful in invalidating the claims which, in our opinion, should never have been granted. It was easy to find prior art. We will continue to introduce the latest traffic management radar technology to the US market. We have just shown that the inter partes review process at USPTO is an effective way to invalidate anticipated and obvious claims, and we will go this way again if needed.”
Case number: 2017-2328 Wavetronix LLC v. Smart Microwave Sensors GmbH, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Patent number: US 6,693,557