Taiwan chip design company Elan Microelectronics Corp on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc, alleging the company infringed its touch screen patents.

We couldn't find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action, Elan spokesman Dennis Liu told the New York Times.

Elan claims that its patent protects the technology enabling finger position recognition on a trackpad or touch screen. Alleging that Apple's MacBook, iPhone and iPod Touch feature technologies are infringing on two of the company's patents, Elan filed a suit in U.S District Court of San Francisco.

The '352 patent is a fundamental patent to the detection of multiple fingers on a touch pad or touch-sensitive input device to enable the detection an use of a multifinger gestures in various applications, said Elan's lawsuit, referring to Patent 5,825,352

Previously, Elan also filed a similar lawsuit against Synaptics, which makes trackpads and multitouch screens, the company won a preliminary court injunction against Synaptics and later ended up in a cross-license agreement.

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