ESS Technology, Inc. Ready to Defend Against Yamaha's Appeal.FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 17, 1995--ESS Technology, Inc. announced today that Yamaha has appealed the order by the Federal District Court in Los Angeles which strongly denied Yamaha's motion for a preliminary injunction A temporary order made by a court at the request of one party that prevents the other party from pursuing a particular course of conduct until the conclusion of a trial on the merits. A preliminary injunction is regarded as extraordinary relief. against the ES1488 and ES1688 chips. ESS expressed confidence that the order denying the injunction will be upheld in the higher court. Yamaha's appeal is its latest attempt in court to stop ESS from shipping its audio chip products that contain ESS' ESFM ESFM Escuela Superior de Fisica y Matematicas (Spanish) ESFM European Society of Feline Medicine music synthesizer, following on the footsteps of its failed attempt for a Temporary Restraining Order temporary restraining order: see injunction. and then a Preliminary Injunction. Yamaha filed a lawsuit against ESS in March 1995 alleging patent infringement patent infringement n. the manufacture and/or use of an invention or improvement for which someone else owns a patent issued by the government, without obtaining permission of the owner of the patent by contract, license or waiver. by the ES 1488 audio chip. "We are confident that the Court of Appeals will uphold the District Court's ruling and deny Yamaha's motion," said Mr. Fred Chan, President of ESS Technology, Inc. "The U.S. Court of Appeals rarely reverses the denial of a motion for a Preliminary Injunction. In addition, the evidence is overwhelming that our products do not infringe on Yamaha's patents. We have successfully demonstrated that to the District Court on two separate occasions, and we are prepared to defeat Yamaha's claims again. We believe this to be Yamaha's ongoing tactic to slow us down, but demands for our chips have increased significantly since the Court's denial on the Preliminary Injunction. We are fulfilling all demands for our chips and expect that growth to accelerate," continued Chan. ESS designs, develops and markets mixed-signal VLSI VLSI: see integrated circuit. (1) (Very Large Scale Integration) Between 100,000 and one million transistors on a chip. See SSI, MSI, LSI and ULSI. (2) (VLSI Technology, Inc., Tempe, AZ, www.semiconductors. integrated circuits for audio applications that range from computers, multimedia and electronic instruments to educational products, consumer products, and toys. The company was founded in 1984 and holds 14 worldwide patents in audio technologies. Since 1989, ESS has shipped over 70 million audio chips. Since the introduction of the first ES488 AudioDrive chip in 1992, ESS has captured many major design wins from PC OEMs with its line of single chip products and has been shipping in volume since. In addition to the ES488 and ES1488, the AudioDrive single chip audio product family also includes ES688, ES788, ES888, ES1688, ES1788 and ES1888. These chips provide single chip support ranging from Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows Sound System A sound card from Microsoft for Windows PCs. The card was not widely used, but certain characteristics of the card are built into Sound Blaster and other sound cards for compatibility with the Windows 3.1 drivers that were created at that time. , DOS, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) OS/2, to complete PC game support and Intel NSP (1) (Network Service Provider) An organization that provides a high-speed Internet backbone to ISPs and other service providers. Sprint, MCI and UUNET are examples of NSPs. See Internet backbones. support. For further information, please contact Albert Mak, ESS Technology, Inc. at 46107 Landing Parkway, Fremont, California, Tel: 510/226-1088, Fax: 510/226-8868. CONTACT: ESS Technology Inc. Albert Mak, 510/226-1088 |
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