HispanicBusiness

Intel said this morning that it will pay $375 million to buy a portfolio of 1,700 wireless technology patents from a small Pennsylvania company called InterDigital.

Intel, largely shut out of the smartphone market, is positioning itself for a comeback. It's accelerating development of its mobile chips, refashioning Google's Android mobile operating system to run on Intel chips, and two years ago it paid $1.4 billion to buy the wireless chip division of Infineon Technologies.

In April, Intel spent $75 million to buy wireless patents from a tech company called Aware.

Shares of InterDigital jumped 31 percent on this morning's news. The company still has more than 18,000 patents in its portfolio.

Increasingly, a large patent portfolio represents table stakes for large technology companies who routinely sue one another to slow rivals' rollouts of new devices. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and many others are all engaged in large patent disputes.

Also this morning, Intel announced a new class of multicore supercomputer chip called the Xeon Phi.