Chip Search for Intellectual Property is a spin-off organization that was formed nearly by accident when a law firm requested that we at SemQuest use our IC design expertise to find a potentially infringing circuit in a large flat GDS database. At that time, we were developing tools for our own use that helped us verify our designs. With significant modifications we were able to put these tools together in a unique way in order to search a netlist or GDS file for potential infringing circuits. The tool is fast. The search is complete. And we have successfully used it on large GDS databases of a size greater than 1Gbyte.

Our first customer for this tool was Translogic Technology Inc. which was awarded $86.5 Million in May of 2005 in a case against Hitachi Ltd. and Renases Technology Inc.