Intellectual Ventures and graphics processor company Nvidia have teamed up to acquire hundreds of patents related to LTE, LTE-Advanced and 3G/4G wireless communications, looking to become stronger players in the intellectual property market for the widely used mobile technologies.

The acquisition of 500 granted and pending patents from IPWireless closed on April 30 and was announced this morning. Military contractor General Dynamics announced an agreement to acquire the parent company of IPWireless last week.

Intellectual Ventures says the assets include standard-essential patents, the term for technologies that play an instrumental role in implementing industry standards. We’ve asked IV if it plans to license those patents to others on fair and reasonable terms — an ongoing subject of controversy in the tech industry — and we’ll update this post depending on what the company says.

Nvidia and IV aren’t disclosing the purchase price for the patent portfolio. The companies say they’ve split ownership of the patents, with Nvidia licensing rights to the patents it didn’t acquire.

IPWireless, which developed the technologies, negotiated a perpetual, royalty free license to the patents as part of the deal.

Intellectual Ventures, based in Bellevue, is the patent licensing and technology company run by former Microsoft tech chief Nathan Myhrvold.

Previously: Intellectual Ventures’ chief dealmaker on patents, used cars and creating a new market

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