>South Korean University suing South Korean Samsung >Took the case to Marshall, Texas >Hey that sounds familiar >Turns out Marshall, Texas is where all the patent trolls like to take their patent cases, since it's been proven that residents of Marshall, Texas side with patent trolls much more often than any other court in the world.
@boozed - probably because they weren't directly involved, they licensed technology from Samsung, or were manufactured by Samsung, so they had no idea Samsung was stealing some IP for that technology.
Global Foundries is owned by ATIC, a high tech investment company owned by Mubadala Investment Company PJSC, a wholly owned investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Not sure how American they are other than having their headquarters in Santa Clara.
Perhaps GF should owe damages, but this isn't clear. They are using the technology, but they licensed it through Samsung. The fact that Samsung did not actually have the authority to license the technology was not known at the time as there was no ruling until now. Samsung is now guilty of selling IP that they did not own, but I'm not sure GF can be held responsible for buying it. It would make more sense for KAIST to press Samsung for at least some of the licensing fees GF paid them. Going forward, though, I think GF had better adjust their licensing agreements to include KAIST.
As to Qualcomm, I see no reason that they should owe damages on this one. They were in no way responsible for Samsung or GF's use of FinFETs. They were simply trying to get their products fabricated. The FinFET nodes were among the nodes offered and made the most sense for some of their products. They had no way of knowing the tech offered was illegal and no control over the node even if they did.
Another company that could be legitimately infringing on their IP is TSMC. Does TSMC have a license to use the tech? I don't recall hearing about TSMC licensing the technology from anyone, but I never heard that Intel did it until now either.
Since it’s Samsung that’s doing the violation, they have to pay the damages. The court noted which companies were having chips made using the technology. They shouldn’t have to pay the fine.
This is similar, in a way, to the claims Qualcomm is making against Apple. Chip makers are licensing Qualcomm technology, but qualcomm wants Apple to pay for the patents. They gave Apple $1 billion a year to cover, but stopped when Apple testified in a couple of cases against them, and they and Apple are suing each other.
But Samsung is especially egregious about this. It’s now been four times they were found to be price fixing products, and were fined well over a billion for those times. The cases with Apple, which Samsung lost around the world, and several large cases they are involved with now with different companies.
In addition their chairmen have now been convicted three times of bribery, the latest resulting in the president of S Korea being thrown out of Office too. It’s basically a criminal organization, which is why I haven’t bought anything from them in years.
@melgross: "The same jury found that GlobalFoundries and Qualcomm had infringed the same patent" "the jury also found that GlobalFoundries (which licenses Samsung’s 14LPP process technology) also infringes KAIST patent. Furthermore, Qualcomm was also found to be infringing the patent because its chips are made by Samsung Foundry and GlobalFoundries."
So they were found infringing the patent by making chips using it but you say they don't pay fines because they don't make chips made using the technology?
they don't directly violate the patents. they make those chips using samsung as an intermediary (qualcomm), or getting licensing from samsung in order to use that patent - licensing that they didn't know did not fully cover the process until now (GlobalFoundries). the prior commenter said the companies /were/ having chips made using the tech. but they aren't directly violating this. they paid samsung to get licensing for the very parts that this violation concerns.
Qualcomm is a partner of Samsung Foundry, so their chips are made with w/e process tech Samsung was offering to foundry partners to build on (the infringed patent is base to the current tech). Global Foundries licensed Samsung 14LPP process because their own first gen fintech was behind schedule.
In this case first offense was by Samsung LSI, and customers of said company are not liable for the infringement.
kind of funny. Trump goes on about the USofA having tech stolen by Others, yet here we have to Korean entities as the base-source of the most fundamental tech. am I the only one to see the irony (or worse)?
Not quite sure what your point is here. It was a Korean company playing fast and loose with a US patent--rights owned by a Korean university.
Also FinFET technology is not all that fundamental, you need thousands of patent licenses to make integrated circuits today. Not all of them are owned by US companies. However the next thing after FinFETs, nanosheet transistors were mostly developed by the part of IBM now owned by GF.
The way patents work is that you can take a patent from one source, add to it so that it improves it and adds additional functionality, and patent that. That’s how this worked.
Apple is also pretty egregious. Two price fixing law suits lost, chip patents stolen from the Wisconsin University, the humiliating loss against Samsung in the British courts. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
Yeah, considering KAIST is a large University and has plenty of funds to get into litigation. One ought to consider small companies or indivudual inventors having their IP ripped off by larger companies (and getting away with it). Totally unfair.
I'd consider that to be a smart move rather than an indication of patent trolling - given that Intel licenced the tech there's a strong implication that it was extremely valuable and therefore it's disingenuous to imply that its originator is a "patent troll".
It took place at a court infamous for being sympathetic to patent trolls, but that does not imply the university is a patent troll, far from it. FinFETs were a genuinely new, revolutionary and non-obvious method of doing transistors on ever-shrinking processes, not some vague "doing X on a computer" patent. The fact that Intel took out a license for a technology that first appeared in their 22nm products also gives them a very strong case for their patent having merit.
Global Foundries is owned by ATIC, a high tech investment company owned by Mubadala Investment Company PJSC, a wholly owned investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Not sure how American they are other than having their headquarters in Santa Clara.
I could see GF perhaps owing damages, though perhaps not. They are using the technology, but they licensed it through Samsung. The fact that Samsung did not actually have the authority to license the technology was not known at the time as I don't believe it had even gone to court yet. Even if it had, there was no ruling until now. It would make more sense for KAIST to press Samsung for at least some of the licensing fees GF paid them. Going forward, though, I think GF had better adjust their licensing agreements to include KAIST.
As to Qualcomm, I see no reason that they should owe damages on this one. They were in no way responsible for Samsung or GF's use of FinFETs. They were simply trying to get their products fabricated. The FinFET nodes were best nodes offered for some of their products, so that is what they used. They had no way of knowing the tech offered was illegal and no control over the node even if they did.
I have to wonder if TSMC has a license to use the tech. I don't recall hearing about them licensing the technology from anyone, but I never heard that Intel did it until now either.
No, these companies, which aren’t all American, are only indirectly violating the patent. Samsung is building the chips, so they are the direct violator. What the court did was to just note some of the companies who are the biggest customers of Samsung, and so have their chips made by Samsung, using the violated patents. It’s not really their fault, and the notion of “first sale” comes into this.
Just created an account to correct this. The original FinFET was invented at UC Berkeley; my semiconductor physics professor from many years ago is one of the co-inventors. Just google "who invented the FinFET?" http://berkeleysciencereview.com/berkeley-intel-th...
This patent pertains to a particular method and process of manufacturing FinFETs. One that KAIST created and apparently Samsung is guilty of using without proper licensing.
The U.S.-based licensing arm of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) sued Samsung over U.S. Patent 6,885,055. yup...fascinate...no...
"According to the Cambridge Corpus of American English, Americans strongly prefer triple as an adjective, noun and verb. British and Australian writers, on the other hand, seem to use both triple and treble, but with treble more frequent as a verb and triple as a noun and adjective."
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JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
>South Korean University suing South Korean Samsung>Took the case to Marshall, Texas
>Hey that sounds familiar
>Turns out Marshall, Texas is where all the patent trolls like to take their patent cases, since it's been proven that residents of Marshall, Texas side with patent trolls much more often than any other court in the world.
boozed - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
And surely it's only a coincidence that the two American companies involved in the suit avoided damages...RMSe17 - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
@boozed - probably because they weren't directly involved, they licensed technology from Samsung, or were manufactured by Samsung, so they had no idea Samsung was stealing some IP for that technology.Samus - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Keep in mind one American company (Intel) avoided litigation by licensing the IP years before all of this went down with Samsung.If Intel licensed it, it was probably worth licensing. Everyone else was just playing with fire.
BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Global Foundries is owned by ATIC, a high tech investment company owned by Mubadala Investment Company PJSC, a wholly owned investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Not sure how American they are other than having their headquarters in Santa Clara.Perhaps GF should owe damages, but this isn't clear. They are using the technology, but they licensed it through Samsung. The fact that Samsung did not actually have the authority to license the technology was not known at the time as there was no ruling until now. Samsung is now guilty of selling IP that they did not own, but I'm not sure GF can be held responsible for buying it. It would make more sense for KAIST to press Samsung for at least some of the licensing fees GF paid them. Going forward, though, I think GF had better adjust their licensing agreements to include KAIST.
As to Qualcomm, I see no reason that they should owe damages on this one. They were in no way responsible for Samsung or GF's use of FinFETs. They were simply trying to get their products fabricated. The FinFET nodes were among the nodes offered and made the most sense for some of their products. They had no way of knowing the tech offered was illegal and no control over the node even if they did.
Another company that could be legitimately infringing on their IP is TSMC. Does TSMC have a license to use the tech? I don't recall hearing about TSMC licensing the technology from anyone, but I never heard that Intel did it until now either.
melgross - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Since it’s Samsung that’s doing the violation, they have to pay the damages. The court noted which companies were having chips made using the technology. They shouldn’t have to pay the fine.This is similar, in a way, to the claims Qualcomm is making against Apple. Chip makers are licensing Qualcomm technology, but qualcomm wants Apple to pay for the patents. They gave Apple $1 billion a year to cover, but stopped when Apple testified in a couple of cases against them, and they and Apple are suing each other.
But Samsung is especially egregious about this. It’s now been four times they were found to be price fixing products, and were fined well over a billion for those times. The cases with Apple, which Samsung lost around the world, and several large cases they are involved with now with different companies.
In addition their chairmen have now been convicted three times of bribery, the latest resulting in the president of S Korea being thrown out of Office too. It’s basically a criminal organization, which is why I haven’t bought anything from them in years.
close - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
@melgross: "The same jury found that GlobalFoundries and Qualcomm had infringed the same patent""the jury also found that GlobalFoundries (which licenses Samsung’s 14LPP process technology) also infringes KAIST patent. Furthermore, Qualcomm was also found to be infringing the patent because its chips are made by Samsung Foundry and GlobalFoundries."
So they were found infringing the patent by making chips using it but you say they don't pay fines because they don't make chips made using the technology?
echoe - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
they don't directly violate the patents. they make those chips using samsung as an intermediary (qualcomm), or getting licensing from samsung in order to use that patent - licensing that they didn't know did not fully cover the process until now (GlobalFoundries).the prior commenter said the companies /were/ having chips made using the tech. but they aren't directly violating this. they paid samsung to get licensing for the very parts that this violation concerns.
melgross - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
But only because they have Samsung build their chips with Samsung technology.FullmetalTitan - Thursday, June 21, 2018 - link
Qualcomm is a partner of Samsung Foundry, so their chips are made with w/e process tech Samsung was offering to foundry partners to build on (the infringed patent is base to the current tech). Global Foundries licensed Samsung 14LPP process because their own first gen fintech was behind schedule.In this case first offense was by Samsung LSI, and customers of said company are not liable for the infringement.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
kind of funny. Trump goes on about the USofA having tech stolen by Others, yet here we have to Korean entities as the base-source of the most fundamental tech. am I the only one to see the irony (or worse)?FreckledTrout - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Applying logic to what Trump says is pointless.eachus - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Not quite sure what your point is here. It was a Korean company playing fast and loose with a US patent--rights owned by a Korean university.Also FinFET technology is not all that fundamental, you need thousands of patent licenses to make integrated circuits today. Not all of them are owned by US companies. However the next thing after FinFETs, nanosheet transistors were mostly developed by the part of IBM now owned by GF.
melgross - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
The way patents work is that you can take a patent from one source, add to it so that it improves it and adds additional functionality, and patent that. That’s how this worked.id4andrei - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Apple is also pretty egregious. Two price fixing law suits lost, chip patents stolen from the Wisconsin University, the humiliating loss against Samsung in the British courts. Don't hate the players, hate the game.melgross - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Apple wins most all of those lawsuits though.boeush - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
Yeah, the original inventors are now labeled "patent trolls" for prosecuting IP thieves. What a world...fteoath64 - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Yeah, considering KAIST is a large University and has plenty of funds to get into litigation. One ought to consider small companies or indivudual inventors having their IP ripped off by larger companies (and getting away with it). Totally unfair.melgross - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Doesn’t matter how big the organization is. These companies, such as Samsung are some of the worlds largest too.mkaibear - Thursday, June 21, 2018 - link
Unfortunately some people think that nothing should be patented and anyone who enforces a patent is a "patent troll"Neglecting the fact that patents are one of the main reasons for the way the technological works has flourished over the last 150 years.
C'est la vie.
Spunjji - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
I'd consider that to be a smart move rather than an indication of patent trolling - given that Intel licenced the tech there's a strong implication that it was extremely valuable and therefore it's disingenuous to imply that its originator is a "patent troll".melgross - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Exactly!r3loaded - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
It took place at a court infamous for being sympathetic to patent trolls, but that does not imply the university is a patent troll, far from it. FinFETs were a genuinely new, revolutionary and non-obvious method of doing transistors on ever-shrinking processes, not some vague "doing X on a computer" patent. The fact that Intel took out a license for a technology that first appeared in their 22nm products also gives them a very strong case for their patent having merit.lilmoe - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
That's a relatively small amount for FinFet. Just pay up Sammy. They should make the American companies pay too, but who are we kidding...BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Global Foundries is owned by ATIC, a high tech investment company owned by Mubadala Investment Company PJSC, a wholly owned investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Not sure how American they are other than having their headquarters in Santa Clara.I could see GF perhaps owing damages, though perhaps not. They are using the technology, but they licensed it through Samsung. The fact that Samsung did not actually have the authority to license the technology was not known at the time as I don't believe it had even gone to court yet. Even if it had, there was no ruling until now. It would make more sense for KAIST to press Samsung for at least some of the licensing fees GF paid them. Going forward, though, I think GF had better adjust their licensing agreements to include KAIST.
As to Qualcomm, I see no reason that they should owe damages on this one. They were in no way responsible for Samsung or GF's use of FinFETs. They were simply trying to get their products fabricated. The FinFET nodes were best nodes offered for some of their products, so that is what they used. They had no way of knowing the tech offered was illegal and no control over the node even if they did.
I have to wonder if TSMC has a license to use the tech. I don't recall hearing about them licensing the technology from anyone, but I never heard that Intel did it until now either.
melgross - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
No, these companies, which aren’t all American, are only indirectly violating the patent. Samsung is building the chips, so they are the direct violator. What the court did was to just note some of the companies who are the biggest customers of Samsung, and so have their chips made by Samsung, using the violated patents. It’s not really their fault, and the notion of “first sale” comes into this.boeush - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
Fascinating thing: a S. Korean institution suing a S. Korean megacorp - in a Texas court. o_OAlso, for some reason I never knew finfets were a KAIST invention. I learned something today: thanks, Anandtech!
costpermille - Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - link
Just created an account to correct this. The original FinFET was invented at UC Berkeley; my semiconductor physics professor from many years ago is one of the co-inventors. Just google "who invented the FinFET?" http://berkeleysciencereview.com/berkeley-intel-th...This patent pertains to a particular method and process of manufacturing FinFETs. One that KAIST created and apparently Samsung is guilty of using without proper licensing.
boeush - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Well whaddayakno... I learned more than one thing today! :)Manch - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
The U.S.-based licensing arm of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) sued Samsung over U.S. Patent 6,885,055. yup...fascinate...no...mdriftmeyer - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
trebel the damages -> triple the damagesFreckledTrout - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
You mean treble = triple"According to the Cambridge Corpus of American English, Americans strongly prefer triple as an adjective, noun and verb. British and Australian writers, on the other hand, seem to use both triple and treble, but with treble more frequent as a verb and triple as a noun and adjective."
Impulses - Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - link
Huh, didn't know that...