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Tech giant Apple has been told to pay $234 million to the intellectual property arm of Wisconsin University, Madison, for using without permission patented technology developed by its team, including two Indian-American engineers.

Apple’s patent case was filed by Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s body for infringing the licensing technology which was developed by the university’s researchers.

According to WARF complaints, the patent titled “Table-Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer” was issued to Andreas Moshovos, Scott Breach, Terani Vijaykumar, and Gurindar Sohi in 1998 as a result of their “labour and ingenuity”. Apple first introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.

Spokesperson Rachel Tulley said only that Apple plans to appeal. The amount was less than the United States dollars 400 million the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) was claiming in damages after the jury earlier in the week said Apple infringed its patent for improving the performance of computer processors. It was the second phase of a trial that began on October 5.

The jury was considering whether Apple’s A7, A8 and A8X processors, found in the iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and iPad Mini with Retina display.

The technology in question essentially helps make devices “smarter” based on past actions.

In a petition to the court past year, Apple argued that a few of WARF’s claims regarding the technology were “unpatentable as obvious”.

WARF had sued Intel for the same patent in 2008 as well, but that case was reportedly settled out of court for an undisclosed sum of money. WARF’s patent, “sounds like a pretty important core technology”, he added. The lawsuit reflects what are essentially “high-stakes negotiations” between Apple and WARF, he said. Seeing as they never sought to use the patent system for what it was meant for, I’d say their claim should be discarded by default.