We aren't patent trolls. Intel stole on our tech and owes my company $2 billion.

Michael Stolarski is CEO of VLSI Technology LLC. Intel was ordered to pay the company $2.18 billion after losing a patent-infringement trial.

It’s important for people to have a clear picture of the kind of company Intel really is as it prepares to take up to $8.5 billion in handouts from U.S. taxpayers through the CHIPS Act.

While nobody can fault Patrick Tiberi for advocating for the interests of Intel, a dues-paying member of his lobbying group, the Ohio Business Roundtable, there is more to the story of Intel’s recent behavior to assess than Tiberi shared in his June 12 guest column.

As Tiberi noted, Intel is in the midst of a protracted attempt to avoid paying more than $2 billion in jury-awarded and court-ordered payments for patent infringement.

These verdicts were reached by two different juries made up of American citizens who found that Intel had improperly taken and used in its products technologies developed by NXP, a semiconductor industry leader and a significant contributor to the U.S. economy in its own right with large workforces in Arizona and Texas.

These verdicts represent some of the biggest jury verdicts against Big Tech in U.S. history and they aren’t large because juries are arbitrarily generous — the verdicts are large because the patented technology at the center of this case is valuable, and Intel has sold more than a billion products that use this technology.

(Full disclosure: The company I lead, VLSI Technologies, is the current owner of the intellectual property in question, having bought it from NXP. VLSI partnered with NXP to license this technology so NXP can focus on technology development and manufacturing.)

Patrick Tiberi: Intel being targeted by patent trolls. We need to know who holds the purse strings.

In his Column, Tiberi dismissed our legal claims against Intel as “frivolous” and suggested that the patents are “poor quality.” But in doing so, Intel supporters like Tiberi risk doing real damage to the public’s understanding of the U.S. patent system, which exists to promote and reward innovation.

When companies like Intel choose to infringe and refuse to pay fair value for their infringement, the patent owner’s only recourse is to go to court.

The patents at issue in these cases were granted by the U.S. Patent Office for major advances in the development of microprocessors used in computers and mobile devices, and two juries rejected Intel’s claims to the contrary.

The issue here is not whether Intel, a company worth well over $100 billion dollars that is set to receive massive taxpayer support, should be protected from proceedings like ours, as Tiberi seemed to suggest.

The real concern is whether inventors will continue to be protected when large powerful companies like Intel take their inventions and sell them as their own. That should matter to anyone who cares about American innovation and the future of the American economy.

Michael Stolarski is CEO of VLSI Technology LLC. Intel was ordered to pay the company $2.18 billion after losing a patent-infringement trial.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Intel owes my company $2 billion and is getting 8.5 billion handout