Samsung, Matsushita Settle Semiconductor Disputes

By Jacqueline Bell, jackie.bell@portfoliomedia.com

Portfolio Media, New York (January 31, 2008)--Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and its rival Samsung Electronics have settled all ongoing patent infringement suits in the United States and Japan over semiconductor technology, the companies announced Wednesday.

The settlement includes a cross-license agreement for semiconductors, and the companies will drop all pending actions.

Neither company would disclose additional details due to confidentiality obligations.

The settlement will close the books on cases in two continents, including a closely followed patent infringement suit pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

In that case, the judge had ordered the parties to renew stalled mediation in September and the companies met with a mediator in October but did not reach an agreement.

The suit, which was originally brought by Samsung in September 2005 as an infringement suit over two patents, had been on track for a summer 2008 trial.

Samsung argued that Matsushita had willfully infringed two of its patents, entitled “methods of forming channels and vias in insulating layers, and trenching techniques for forming vias and channels in multilayer electrical interconnects.” Both patents were issued to Samsung in 1992, according to the company.

Matsushita and Samsung have been engaged in a flurry of patent battles since 2002 both here in the United States and in Japan. The new, broad settlement is the second they have announced in recent months.

In December, Samsung SDI Co., an arm of South Korean conglomerate Samsung, and Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. settled their patent infringement disputes over plasma screen technology.

Samsung and Matsushita, the world's biggest plasma display panel manufacturers, dropped claims brought against one another in two disputes initiated by Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, according to court documents submitted on Nov. 30.

The dismissal of those suits had been expected after the companies filed court papers earlier in November stating that they had entered into a memorandum of understanding. They agreed in principle on terms and conditions of a formal settlement and cross-license agreement that would entirely resolve those disputes.

Still pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is a separate case, in which Matsushita has appealed an August 2006 ruling by a New Jersey district court, which found no infringement by either party of the companies' respective patents of dynamic random access memory chips.

That decision came nearly five years after Matsushita first filed suit against Samsung for allegedly infringing three of its DRAM chip patents.

The Texas semiconductor patent suit is Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., v. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. et al., case number 6:06-cv-00154.