Agrees to Pay US$40 Mil. in Royalties
After several years of a legal battle, SK Hynix has settled a patent dispute with Netlist, a U.S. semiconductor company.
SK Hynix and Netlist signed a mutual patent use contract on memory semiconductor technology and decided to drop patent infringement lawsuits filed with the Texas Western District Court and the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
Under the agreement, SK Hynix will pay about US$40 million in royalties to Netlist to use its U.S. patents.
Netlist, a NASDAQ-listed company, was founded in 2000 by Hong Chun-ki, a former CEO of LG Semiconductor. Netlist filed complaints with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in 2016 and 2017, claiming that SK Hynix violated its U.S. semiconductor patents. But the ITC arrived at a conclusion that SK Hynix did not infringe Netlist’s patents.
Netlist later filed a patent infringement lawsuit against SK Hynix with the Western District Court of Texas in 2020. The agreement puts an end to the patent dispute in five years.