Filed by Patent Troll
Tessera filed a lawsuit against Samsung Electronics with the United States International Trade Commission in September this year.
“Samsung Electronics used my company’s technology without permission for the 20 years following our first patent sharing contract in 1997 and Samsung Electronics is continuing to do so even though the contract expired late last month,” CEO Jon Kirchner claimed at that time, adding, “My company tried to extend the period of our patent sharing, only to fail, and this means Samsung Electronics left my company no option but to take legal action to protect intellectual property rights.”
Tessera is one of the most well-known patent trolls. Back in 2011, Business Insider picked it as one of the top eight patent trolls. At that time, Tessera joined the list of non-practicing entities (NPEs) with Rambus, which were engaged in litigation with SK Hynix for over 10 years.
“It seems that Tessera filed the lawsuit because it failed to extend the agreement with Samsung Electronics,” said an industry insider, adding, “This is a typical move of patent trolls.”
Tessera and Samsung formed their relationship in 1997. At that time, Samsung Electro-Mechanics signed a contract with Tessera so that the former’s substrate design and manufacturing techniques and patents can be shared with the latter in return for the latter’s sharing of its double substrate patents and techniques. A similar contract was signed between Samsung Electronics and Tessera in 2005 and it was extended in 2014.
At present, Tessera is claiming that Samsung Electronics infringed upon two of its patents related to wafer-level packaging (WLP). WLP can be defined as a technique allowing finished semiconductor products to be obtained on the wafer level without packaging. WLP is advantageous in terms of product volume reduction.