MUST BE SOMETHING IN THE WATER - ACACIA PULLS THE TRIGGER ON INTEL AND TI: Acacia Research Corporation announced today that Microprocessor Enhancement Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary that is part of the Acacia Technologies group, a leader in technology licensing, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the District Court for the Central District of California against Intel Corporation and Texas Instruments Corporation.

The lawsuit alleges patent infringement by Intel's Itanium line of microprocessors, and certain series of digital signal processors sold by Texas Instruments. Intel does not break out individual chip sales, but analysts have predicted that sales of Itanium processors will reach several billion dollars a year by 2007.

Microprocessor Enhancement Corporation's patent generally relates to an architecture employed in advanced pipeline processors. This architecture allows for conditional execution of processor instructions, and a later determination of whether the instructions executed should be written back to memory. By conditionally executing instructions in this architecture, improvements in processor speed can be achieved.