Part Number:DRV8601
It seems that that patent trolls are alive and strong and the company https://www.immersion.com/ has over 3000 patents in the use of haptics that seem to cover every possible scenario. No one can go thru 3000 patents, but the first couple seem to be so broad that anyone that puts a vibrator motor in ANYTHING (especially game controllers, phones, wearables, etc.) are covered by their patents.
They have NEVER made a product and simply sue large companies AFTER they have installed vibrators in their product (sony, microsoft, lg, samsung and others), all of which have lost in court and had to pay royalties.
My question to TI is simple, if we use one of your driver ICs to control a vibrator motor in our product, do YOU have any deal in place with Immersion that stipulates that the license fee is baked into the motor driver IC? OR we can go thru a program via TI to get a discounted license fee per unit?
Basically, many technologies like USB, MP3, etc. have licensing fees, and many ICs have these baked into the cost, so if you use the IC, the manufacture has already paid this fee for a large volume and thus got a discount, and everyone is happy.
We are investigating this, do not want to be sued, but again, don't want to pay for something we don't need to, and of course don't want to waste a lot of money to have attorneys pour thru 1000's of pages of patents to see if our application is covered or not by Immersion IF this is MOOT due to TI having some kind of deal in place.
Does anyone from TI have any intel about this or can put me in touch with someone that can speak to this?
Thanks,
Andre' LaMothe
ceo@nurve.net