SK Hynix has reached an agreement with Netlist, a US semiconductor company that has filed semiconductor-related patent litigation for many years.
According to industry sources on the 7th, SK Hynix and Netlist have signed a cross license agreement for the memory semiconductor technology of both companies and decided to drop a patent use dispute between the Texas Western District Court and the US Patent Office.
According to this agreement, SK Hynix will be able to pay royalties to Netlist and use the Netlist US patent, which the Netlist side has claimed to infringe.
It is known that the royalty paid by SK Hynix is about 40 million dollars (about 44.6 billion won).
Netlist, an American NASDAQ-listed company, was founded in 2000 by CEO Hong Chun-ki from LG Semiconductor.
Netlist filed a lawsuit against the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in 2016 and 2017, claiming that SK Hynix infringed on its U.S. semiconductor technology patent, but ITC concluded that there was no patent infringement of SK Hynix in both cases.
After that, Netlist filed a patent infringement lawsuit against SK Hynix in the Texas Western District Court last year, and this agreement ended the patent dispute after five years.
CEO Hong said, “I am happy to be recognized for the value of Netlist’s intellectual property,” and said, “We are looking forward to a partnership with SK Hynix, a global leader in memory and storage technology.”
/yunhap news
Ⓒ Hankyung.com prohibits unauthorized reproduction and redistribution