The Apple world headquarters located in Cupertino on March 18, 2014.

The California Institute of Technology and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan have won a $1.1 billion patent infringement award against Apple Inc. and Broadcom Corp. over Wi-Fi chip technology.

Jurors in the Los Angeles courtroom of U.S. District Judge George Wu of the Central District of California returned a verdict Wednesday of $838 million against Apple and $270 million against Broadcom over three patents related to error correction technology for Wi-Fi transmissions.

Caltech argued to the jury that Broadcom incorporated the infringing technology into its Wi-Fi chips at Apple's direction and has supplied them to more than 1 billion devices around the world. Apple has argued in court papers that Caltech's real beef is with Broadcom, not with Apple.

Quinn Emanuel's team featured partners James Asperger, Rachael McCracken, Kevin Johnson and Bill Price.

Price told jurors in his opening statement that Caltech professor Robert McEliece developed U.S. Patents 7,116,710, 7,421,032 and 7,916,781 with Ph.D. students Hui Jin and Aamod Khandekar. They were looking for ways to reduce errors in transmissions to satellites and faraway spacecraft. Their solution was a technology called an irregular repeat and accumulate code.

That invention represented "the best combination for speed, distance, reliability with the real-world benefits" of low complexity and battery conservation, Price told the jurors.

Apple and Broadcom were represented by Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. Apple had sought to sever its case from Broadcom's last summer, arguing that "Apple is merely an indirect downstream party whose products incorporate the accused chips."

Apple had tried repeatedly to invalidate the patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board with only limited success. That took validity mostly off the table in the trial before Wu.

A Caltech spokesperson said the university is pleased with the verdict and grateful for the attention shown by jurors over the two-week trial. "As a nonprofit institution of higher education, Caltech is committed to protecting its intellectual property in furtherance of its mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education," the spokesperson said.