Carnegie Mellon Keeps Disk-Drive Patents Alive in Broadcom Case

Carnegie Mellon University kept two hard-disk drive patents in play after a California federal judge rejected a bid by Broadcom Inc. units to end the nearly eight-year-old infringement case before trial by arguing the patents covered abstract ideas.

The asserted claims of US Patent Nos. 6,201,839 and 6,438,180 describe a specific improvement in disk-drive data detection—using signal-dependent techniques to improve sequence detection by reducing noise—not an abstract idea, Judge James Donato wrote in an opinion issued Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

In rejecting a bid by LSI Corp. and Avago Technologies US Inc. ...