Japan’s Toshiba Corp. and South Korea’s Hynix Semiconductor Inc. has recently announced that they have signed a cross-licence deal to end a series of lawsuits and countersuits on patents for NAND-type flash memory chips. These to firms were involved in a fierce legal battle in US and Japan when Toshiba, world’s second largest NAND chip maker, had filed a case against Hyinx in 2004 after these firms failed to continue a cross-licencing deal. Toshiba in its case had accused Hyinx infringing of its intellectual property rights.
Both the companies in a joint statement have said that the agreements settle all pending patent-related litigation between the companies in the U.S. and Japan, including that before the U.S. International Trade Commission. It further outlined that that the agreements, covering patents and product supply for semiconductor technology; mean they will be cross licensed to use one another’s semiconductor patents. However, other details of the deal have not been disclosed by the firms.
However, reports suggest that certain type of products would be shipped to Toshiba for which the Japanese company will pay market prices. On the other hand, Hynix also will still pay royalties and other fees to Toshiba for its patents.
Last September, Toshiba was forced to pay $288 million for Micron’s NAND Flash semiconductor technology and license patents to resolve all of the litigation between Toshiba and Lexar Media, which Micron had acquired in June. At the same time, even Hynix is also not a stranger to memory chip litigation. Last year, a San Jose, California, federal jury had awarded $306.9 million to memory chip maker Rambus after finding that Hynix had been infringing on 10 Rambus patents.
In the meanwhile, Hyinx and U.S. storage card maker SanDisk Corp. have inked a cross licence deal for NAND-type flash memory chips and a preliminary accord to jointly develop new flash technology.
