Everlight Electronics Co (億光電子), the nation’s top light-emitting diode (LEDs) chip packager, yesterday said its product lines remain intact, even though a US court fined it as part of a patent infringement case filed by Nichia Corp.
The Japanese company on Monday said the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan had ruled in its favor on Dec. 20 last year in an ongoing patent infringement dispute involving yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) phosphors to create white LEDs.
The court fined the New Taipei City (新北市)-based company US$5,000 for noncompliance, as well as ordering it to pay attorneys’ fees and costs for Nichia.
“The court’s order is irrelevant to the outcome of the litigation, which is to rule whether Everlight infringed Nichia’s patents or whether Nichia’s patents remain valid. Therefore, the order did not have an impact on Everlight’s products,” Everlight said in a Chinese-language statement posted on its Web site yesterday.
In compliance with the court’s prior order, Everlight had submitted the documents listing Everlight’s LED products and samples, the company said.
Nichia has filed 28 patent suits against Everlight since 2006 in Taiwan, the US, Japan, Germany and China.
Over the same period, Everlight has four patent suits against the Japanese firm — in Taiwan, Germany and China.
Everlight has won only one of the lawsuits, at Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Court.
Nichia said it had received 19 favorable rulings from courts in Japan and China and is still waiting for a ruling from a Japanese court amid its appeals.
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Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
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