Nokia accused

and its subsidiary, SnapTrack, recently filed suit against

and Nokia Inc in federal court in

for infringement of eleven QUALCOMM's patents and one patent owned by SnapTrack.

QUALCOMM says it's lawsuit includes patents that are essential for the manufacture or use of equipment that complies with the GSM, GPRS and EDGE cellular standards (the GSM family of standards) and other patents that are infringed by Nokia's products.

According to a statement, patents that are essential to a standard are those that must necessarily be infringed to comply with the requirements of the standard.

QUALCOMM's complaint alleges that Nokia is infringing QUALCOMM's patents by making or selling products in the United States that comply with the GSM family of standards. QUALCOMM is seeking an injunction against Nokia's continuing sale of infringing products and monetary damages.

"We have been discussing a number of issues with Nokia for some time, including the fact that we have essential GSM patents for which Nokia is not licensed, and we are disappointed that this has resulted in litigation," said Louis M. Lupin, senior vice president and general counsel of QUALCOMM. "Until recently, we had been led to believe that these issues might be resolved co-operatively and amicably.

“However, it now appears that a co-operative resolution of these issues is quite unlikely and we must move forward with the litigation in order to protect our rights and to get these issues resolved."

Demand from cell phone users for data services and multimedia features has been growing since the advent of second-generation (2G) cellular technologies. The ability to provide better data performance is one of the primary reasons that the wireless industry has selected CDMA technology for nearly all third-generation (3G) cellular standards and systems.

Faced with this demand and spurred by competition from CDMA systems, 2G standards, such as GSM, have been evolved to support improved data capabilities.

These evolutions of GSM-first GPRS and later EDGE-have adopted patented innovations developed by QUALCOMM originally for use in CDMA systems to: achieve higher data rates, increase spectral efficiency, enhance capacity, improve resistance to interference, permit access to packet switched networks, and facilitate multimedia distribution.

Nokia's GSM, GPRS and EDGE standards-compliant products unavoidably infringe QUALCOMM's patents surrounding these inventions that have become essential to the GSM family of standards. Six of the patents in QUALCOMM's complaint against Nokia were also asserted in the complaint that QUALCOMM filed against Broadcom Corporation on July 11, 2005.