Innovative Foundry Technologies LLC (IFT) announced today that it has resolved patent litigation with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), which now triggers the beginning of the second wave of IFT’s foundry licensing program.
The first wave of IFT’s multinational licensing program focused on TSMC and UMC in Germany, China and the United States. IFT launched this first wave in December 2018, when it initiated suit against Texas Instruments (TI), Volkswagen, and Ford in Dusseldorf, Germany, based on their use of UMC-manufactured OMAP processors, which IFT alleged infringe its patented technology. IFT later added UMC to the Dusseldorf action in August 2019. In February 2019, IFT also filed a series of cases against TSMC and its customers, including MediaTek, Qualcomm, Cisco, VIZIO, TCL, Hisense, BBK, Oppo, and Oneplus in a number of jurisdictions, including Shanghai, China, the U.S. International Trade Commission and U.S. district courts. IFT entered into confidential settlement agreements with TSMC, Qualcomm, and MediaTek in August 2019 that fully resolved the U.S. and Chinese litigation, and shortly thereafter reached a deal with UMC and TI to resolves the German litigation. The representation provided by a team of lawyers at Mintz, led by Michael Renaud and Adam Rizk, has been central to IFT’s multinational program and successes to date, and will continue to be an essential element of IFT’s ongoing global licensing program.
Tom Loureiro, IFT’s Executive Vice President of IP Licensing and Strategy, stated: “We are extremely pleased with the expeditious resolution of these infringement proceedings. Achieving this favorable result for the company, in less than a year, speaks to the strength of IFT’s patent portfolio and licensing strategy. It should be noted that UMC and TI, in particular, recognized the value of taking a license early, thereby avoiding escalation through additional litigation that would have been filed by IFT in the United States and that would have been more costly for all parties. We can now turn more of our attention to licensing the portfolio to the many other parties who we believe are practicing IFT’s patented technologies.”
By way of background, IFT acquired its portfolio of over 125 U.S. and foreign patents and patent applications in July 2018from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). These patents cover semiconductor devices and methods of manufacturing that are foundational to planar and finfet transistors. AMD developed and patented this critical technology before it spun out its semiconductor manufacturing business as Globalfoundries.