Local sapphire crystal maker Tera Xtal Technology Corp (鑫晶鑽) yesterday said it has filed patent infringement lawsuits in Taiwan against Apple Inc to safeguard its interests.
Apple has illegally used Tera Xtal’s patented technology to incorporate sapphire into camera lenses used in its iPhone series, company spokesperson Peggy Hsu (許雅玲) said by telephone.
The company also sued local handset retailer Senao International Co (神腦國際) and Vibo Telecom Inc (威寶電信) because they sell iPhones domestically, she said.
“Tera Xtal wants to protect its intellectual property rights and safeguard its investors’ interests. Tera has invested heavily on the sapphire technology,” Hsu said.
“Targeting the company with the biggest sales volume is just our first step,” she said, implying that the company may wage more legal battles against global brands such as Samsung Electronics Co and LG Electronics Co.
In the lawsuits filed with the Intellectual Property Court in New Taipei City, Tera Xtal demands that the named companies stop making, selling and importing products containing the “problematic components,” according to the company’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
Tera Xtal also seeks patent infringement damages of NT$300 million (US$9.88 million), according to the filing.
Tera Xtal will not rule out filing infringement lawsuits overseas against Apple, Hsu said.
As legal wrangling has become a tool to form technology partnerships and to initiate supply contracts, Hsu said the company hopes “to apply this innovative [sapphire substrate] technology to more mobile devices by licensing patents or supplying products.”
In a separate filing, Tera Xtal said it has received a US court ruling that its sapphire crystal equipment supplier, GT Advanced Technologies, has to return US$24.29 million Tera Xtal paid for a machine it ordered, because the machine is flawed.
GT Advanced Technologies filed for bankruptcy protection in a US court in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Monday.
“We believe we can recover that payment,” Hsu said.
GT Advanced Technologies has paid back US$7 million and is to pay the remaining US$17.29 million, she said.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
RSS