Cadence sues Mentor for 'malicious prosecution'

Cadence sues Mentor for 'malicious prosecution'
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Reacting to a flood of ongoing patent litigation lawsuits, Cadence Design Systems Inc. said Monday (Oct. 28) that it has filed a lawsuit charging Mentor Graphics Corp. and Aptix Corp. with unfair business practices. Cadence is seeking to recoup its costs from a 2000 lawsuit in which a judge accused Amr Mohsen, Aptix's chief executive officer, of massive fraud.

In an unrelated suit, Mentor Graphics said Monday that it had won a third summary judgment against Cadence for the alleged infringement of patent by its Quickturn Mercury and Mercury Plus products. That suit is scheduled for trial January 2003.

Mentor and Quickturn, a Cadence company, have traded lawsuits for years over alleged patent violations. Mentor file several suits against Cadence after it acquired Quickturn in 1999. The Aptix lawsuit arose after Mentor's Meta division acquired an Aptix patent for $1 million, for the apparent purpose of suing Cadence one more time.

But the gambit backfired in June 2000, when Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court dismissed the case after accusing Mohsen of fraud. The court documents state that Mohsen fabricated engineering diaries and staged a break-in of his own car to steal the notebooks. Aptix denied the charges and appealed, but lost the appeal in November 2001.

But that didn't resolve the case, said Penny Herscher, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Cadence. "We are still carrying costs associated with it, and we are looking for compensatory damages for our costs in defending against a frivolous suit," she said. "Also, we want to bring attention to the fact that this is malicious prosecution."

What's ironic is that Mentor itself sued Aptix for fraud and civil conspiracy after the failed 2000 lawsuit, seeking to recover its own legal costs. A Mentor spokesman was unable to provide any further information about that lawsuit Monday. Aptix representatives were also unavailable for comment about either the Mentor fraud lawsuit or the new Cadence filing.

Mentor's action against Aptix doesn't get it off the hook, Herscher said. "Mentor was the aggressor," she said. "We see them as conducting malicious prosecution. They collaborated to create a fraudulent situation."

In a statement issued Monday, Mentor president Greg Hinckley said that courts ruled in both June 2000 and November 2001 that there was no evidence of Mentor wrongdoing. "We believe these claims against Mentor are old news. They date prior to June 2000 and have been twice rejected by the courts," he said.

The new Cadence lawsuit seeks $4.6 million in compensation from Mentor, Meta and Aptix, and asks the court to consider punitive damages. No trial date has been set.

Meanwhile, Herscher brushed aside this week's loss of a summary judgment to Mentor, stating that it's all part of the "normal back and forth" that occurs before a trial. "We win some, they win some," she said.

Herscher noted that Mentor "just keeps firing off suits at Quickturn and Cadence." In addition to the Mercury and Mercury plus lawsuit, there's another Mentor suit in progress that cites Quickturn's Palladium system, she said. That suit was filed after Mentor acquired Ikos Systems Inc. this summer.

There's also pending litigation in France and Germany. In the latter country, Mentor challenged the validity of a patent it had filed, a Cadence spokesman said; when a court refused to hear that challenge, Mentor got Avanti Corp. to sue Cadence, he said. "They won, and we're appealing that in Germany," he said.

But Quickturn and Cadence have also filed suits against Mentor, and some years ago, Quickturn succeeded in banning Mentor's SimExpress emulator, made by Mentor's Meta subsidiary in France, from U.S. shores. Herscher said Cadence has only sued "defensively."

"It just keeps going on, so we're trying to say, enough malicious prosecution," said Herscher. "And we'd like to be compensated for our legal costs."