On July 3, the Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court of Fujian Province of China ruled that Micron Semiconductor Sales (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. immediately stopped selling and importing several Crucial SSDs, memory modules and related chips, and deleted the above products’ advertisement, purchase links and other related information from its website, and ruled that Micron Semiconductor (Xi'an) Co., Ltd. immediately stopped manufacturing, selling and importing several memory products.
It is understood that the plaintiff of the lawsuit is Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd. (JHICC), which cooperates with Taiwan UMC to develop DRAM technology. Previously, JHICC sued Micron's own brand Crucial's MX300 2.5-inch SSD 525GB SSD and Crucial DDR4 2133 8G notebook memory module for alleged infringement. Later, it discovered that more than ten products of Micron were suspected of infringing JHICC patents, and then sued Micron.
Today, Micron stated: "Micron has not received the preliminary ban mentioned by UMC and Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd. in the July 3 statement. It will not comment before evaluating the documents from Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court. ”
In fact, the patent issue between UMC and Micron originated from Micron Taiwan’s employees who switched job to UMC. Since UMC cooperated with Fujian Jinhua Technology to produce 32nm DRAM, Micron Taiwan believes that these two employees have stolen confidential technical information. In February last year, Micron filed a lawsuit against UMC in Taiwan and filed a patent lawsuit against UMC in the United States in September 2017. According to Micron’s court documents and the Taiwan authorities, these engineers illegally took away more than 900 documents, including key specifications and details of Micron's advanced memory chips.
A UMC spokesperson denied the allegations and declined to comment further. JHICC did not respond to requests for comment.
At the beginning of this year, JHICC and UMC filed a lawsuit against the Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court in Fujian, China, and filed three lawsuits against companies such as Micron Semiconductor (Xi'an) and Micron Semiconductor Sales (Shanghai), requesting compensation amounting to RMB 270 million. In addition, the court was requested to order the relevant defendant to stop manufacturing, processing, importing, and selling of the alleged infringing product, and to destroy all inventory and related molds and tools.
As a major electronics producer and the world's largest consuming country of electronic products, China market accounts for about 25% of total sales of Micron. If the ban is implemented, Micron will be hit hard.
