Qualcomm found in contempt

A federal judge has found Qualcomm Inc. in contempt of an order designed to prevent the company from violating three Broadcom Corp. patents.

U.S. District Judge James Selna in Santa Ana found that San Diego-based Qualcomm violated the injunction by continuing to use infringing chips and ordered it to stop the infringement, Broadcom said Thursday.

The judge said Qualcomm also failed to pay royalties for an infringed product, Irvine-based Broadcom said. Qualcomm was ordered to pay further profits to Broadcom.

The 2007 jury verdict found that Qualcomm’s chips infringed three Broadcom patents, including one for “push-to-talk” technology used for the QChat features of Sprint Nextel Corp.’s mobile phones and two others for video encoding and wireless Internet.