A jury has found Apple’s A7 and A8 chips violate a patent belonging to the licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin, and the world’s richest smartphone maker is now on the hook for up to $862 million in damages. The patent was submitted by the University in 1996, and the team behind the patent is consisted by 4 researchers among them the Greek Andreas Moshovos

(Andreas I. Moshovos, Scott E. Breach, Terani N. Vijaykumar, Gurindar S. Sohi).

The Wisconsin jury reached a verdict on Monday that Apple infringed US Patent No. 5,781,752, and the trial now enters a separate damages phase. The patent is owned by Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, a university patent-licensing organization that was suing over patents before it was cool. WARF sued Sony over patents in 2003, and both IBM and Samsung in 2004. It asserted the same patent Apple was found to infringe to sue Intel in 2008, but the case settled just before trial the following year.

The ‘752 patent, issued to four University of Wisconsin computer scientists in 1998, “has been recognized by those in the art as a major milestone in the field of computer microprocessing,” WARF lawyers wrote in their complaint (PDF) filed last year. A second WARF v. Apple lawsuit was filed in September, citing the same patent to demand royalties on the A9 and A9X processors used in Apple’s iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, and iPad Pro.

Who is Andreas Moshovos

Andreas Moshovos along with his students has been answering the question “what is the best possible digital computation structure to solve problem X or to run application Y?” where “best” is a characteristic (or combination thereof) such as power, cost, complexity, etc. Much of his work has been on high-performance processor and memory system design and it has influenced commercial designs. Andreas Moshovos has received the Ptyhio and a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Crete in 1990 and 1992 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. He has taught Computer Design at Northwestern University, USA, (Assistant Professor 1998-2000),  the Ecole Polytechnique de Laussane, Switzerland, (Invited Professor 2011) and since 2000 at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Toronto where he now is a professor. Andreas Moshovos has served as the Program Chair for the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture in 2011  and on numerous technical program committees in the area of Computer Architecture. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters and the Elsevier Journal on Parallel and Distributed Computing.