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 Patent News |
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| Subject : Samsung to pay Spansion $70m to end patent fight |
| Date |
2009-04-29 |
Visit |
4702 |
Spansion Inc., the bankrupt maker of mobile-phone memory chips, said Samsung Electronics Co. will pay $70 million to end a patent fight that could have resulted in an import ban of the Apple Inc. iPod and other electronics.
The settlement, which is subject to approval by a U.S. bankruptcy court, includes an agreement that each company will license the other`s patents. It ends cases pending before the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington and a federal court in Delaware against Suwon, Korea-based Samsung, Asia`s biggest maker of chips.
Spansion had been seeking an ITC order to ban the imports of electronics that used certain Samsung chips, including the iPod, Research In Motion Ltd.`s BlackBerry e-mail device and Lenovo Group Ltd.`s personal computers. Spansion has said it acted after Samsung refused to sign a patent-licensing agreement over a type of flash memory called NAND, which stores songs and pictures on portable electronics.
The agreement is a significant step forward in Spansion`s reorganization process, demonstrating the company`s intense focus on improving its financial position in the current economic climate, Spansion said in a statement.
Former Spansion CEO Bertrand Cambou, 53, in November said the Sunnyvale, California-based company could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing revenue from its patents. He resigned as CEO on Feb. 2, a month before the company filed for bankruptcy protection to restructure its debt.
Spansion, created by the merger of the flash-memory units of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd., has struggled to make money in the market for NOR flash memory, a type of semiconductor that stores the operating system in mobile phones.
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