2025-02-19 - LD Hamburg - Lionra Technologies v. Cisco Systems

1. For the interpretation of a patent whose purpose is to overcome the time delay, the so-called latency time, in the processing of data packets and in particular headers during transmission in a wireless network. 2. When interpreting the patent claim, the application description and express disclosures in the description of the patent specification must be taken into account in addition to the wording.

The Hamburg LD (Klepsch/Schilling/Agergaard/Keller) dismissed both the infringement action and the counterclaim for revocation. The patent (EP 2 201 740 B1, fast packet processing via DMA-based parallel header writing) was held valid over 6 prior art documents, all lacking the patented pre-positioned DMA architecture. Infringement denied because Cisco's Catalyst 9x00 switches do not implement a DMA device — the Ingress FIFO is a simple data pipeline lacking control logic (programmable registers/channels), and the IFC parser performs sequential extraction. Costs split 40/60.