The company added that Casio Computer joined HP as the second system manufacturer to purchase a license to use intellectual property protected by the Moore Microprocessor Patent (MMP) portfolio.

The MMP portfolio is owned jointly by Patriot (San Diego) and the TPL Group (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and is marketed by Alliacense, a subsidiary of TPL. Patriot did not say how much TPL had received as its share of the licensing arrangements.

AMD was the first company to license the MMP portfolio in February 2005. The terms of the licensing were undisclosed and at the time AMD announced it had taken an undisclosed stake in Patriot Scientific. Intel licensed the MMP portfolio in July 2005 and HP signed up in January 2006.

Patriot and TPL came together in June 2005 to settle a long-standing patent dispute between the two parties so they could pursue third parties. The TPL Group (Cupertino, Calif.) has been granted full responsibility and authority for the commercialization and licensing of a unified portfolio of ten patents.

Prior to that Patriot had been pursuing many major Japanese systems companies for alleged patent infringement but without success.

The Alliacense MMP portfolio is named after inventor Charles H. Moore, chief technology officer of TPL Group, who is known for inventing the Forth software programming language and for his work in the 1980s on stack-based microprocessors.

Three of the most significant patents are: U.S. Patent 5,809,336, which covers the separate clocking of CPU and I/O; U.S. Patent 6,598,148, which covers the use of multiple cores and embedded memory; and U.S. Patent 5,784,584, which covers fetching multiple instructions.

TPL Group's Alliacense division is now negotiating licenses with companies whose products include high speed microprocessors. More than 150 of these companies have been put on notice of likely patent infringement and they include practically every high-tech consumer electronics manufacturer and systems integrator in the global marketplace, said Patriot.