Compaq & Seagate Sued For $800 Million - Company Business and Marketing

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, July 24, 2000

Convolve Inc. announced that it and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as obligated through its license agreement with Convolve, filed a lawsuit against Compaq Computer Corp. and Seagate Technology Inc. in the US District Court Southern District of New York, which according to the complaint, seeks "to prevent Compaq and Seagate from stealing Convolve's proprietary computer disk drive technology."

Convolve is seeking at least $800 million in damages and seeks a permanent injunction barring Compaq and Seagate from manufacturing or selling disk drives or computers incorporating Seagate's "Sound Barrier Technology" (SBT) feature.

Convolve is the exclusive licensee of patented motion control technology called Input Shaping, originally developed at and licensed from MIT. This technology is a method for commanding equipment to move as quickly as possible without excitation of vibrations. In a disk drive application, Input Shaping Control of the read/write arm permits the fast and quiet performance by reducing the vibrations that are generated at the end of the "seek" or the movement of the arm between tracks on the disk. Information can't be written or read by the computer until the arm settles (stops vibrating). These same vibrations are also responsible for much of the noise generated by computers.

According to the compliant, "For more than a year, beginning in October 1998, Convolve held discussions with and gave demonstrations for engineers and executives of both Compaq and Seagate for the purpose of licensing their technologies to these two companies."

Both Compaq and Seagate had signed non-disclosure agreements (NDA) not to use this proprietary technology to develop competing products.

The action filed in Federal court alleges that the computer giant and its disk drive supplier misappropriated Convolve's technology.

In 1989, Neil Singer, PhD, and Ken Pasch, PhD along with MIT professor Warren Seering invented the technology under a government grant to perfect a vibration control technology in computer controlled machines. The results of this research have been applied in a number of applications from large gantry cranes to microscopic MEMS based devices. In 1989, Dr. Singer formed Convolve, a privately held company based in New York City.