Qualcomm said on Monday it wanted Nokia, the world's No 1 mobile phone maker, to stop selling or producing products in the United States designed for GSM mobile phone networks and that it was demanding financial damages from the Finnish mobile firm.
The suit comes just days after Nokia and five other high technology companies complained to the European Commission about Qualcomm's market practices, accusing it of stifling competition in the third- generation mobile phone chip market. Qualcomm rejected the accusations.
A Nokia spokeswoman said the company had no immediate comment on the Qualcomm lawsuit, which was filed in San Diego Federal Court on November 4.
Qualcomm dominates the market for technology and chips for CDMA, the mobile phone technology it invented. It said Nokia has used some of Qualcomm's CDMA technology to improve GSM networks so that they too could achieve faster speeds for data services such as video calls and Internet downloads.
GSM, short for Global System for Mobile Communications, has become the dominant mobile phone standard and is used in about two out of every three handsets in the world.
The CDMA standard is mostly used in the Americas and parts of Asia.
Qualcomm accused Nokia of infringing its patents by making or selling products in the United States that comply with GSM standards. It said the lawsuit affected 11 Qualcomm patents and one belonging to its wholly owned subsidiary, SnapTrack Inc.
"Until recently, we had been led to believe that these issues might be resolved co-operatively and amicably," Qualcomm lawyer and Senior Vice President Louis M. Lupin said.