South Korean patent management company Mimir IP has filed a lawsuit against Micron Technology, claiming the company has infringed on six chip-related patents Mimir bought from SK Hynix.
The lawsuit, which was filed with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas and the US International Trade Commission on June 3, also names Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Tesla – all companies that are using the allegedly infringed-upon technology.
The patents were acquired by Mimir IP from SK Hynix after the company bought a cache of 1,500 chip-related patents from the Korean memory chipmaker last month. The patents at the center of the lawsuit relate to voltage measurement devices and non-volatile memory devices.
SK Hynix is not directly involved in the legal case.
Mimir IP is a non-practicing entity (NPE), a company that acquires a patent or patent rights but does not use the patented technology or manufacturer or sell any products related to it for commercial gain. Sometimes called ‘patent trolls’, NPEs often acquire patents for the sole purpose of filing infringement claims to win large financial compensation offerings.
Non-profits and universities often fit the description of an NPE but are not considered patent trolls as their patented technologies are usually reserved for research purposes.
DCD has reached out to Micron for comment on the lawsuit.
Micron was previously sued for patent infringement in 2022 by Katana Silicon Technologies, which alleged the company had infringed upon three of its patents. In 2023, Katana’s parent company, an NPE called Longhorn IP, ultimately had an $8 million bond placed upon it by an Idaho judge after Micron argued the company was filing ‘bad faith infringement claims’.
That case is still being argued in Idaho’s Federal Circuit court.
That same year, Micron also settled an IP theft lawsuit with state-backed Chinese chip firm Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit. In that instance, both parties opted to dismiss their respective lawsuits.
In May 2024, Micron was ordered to pay computer memory company Netlist $445 million in damages for violating patent rights in memory-module technology for high-performance computing. In that case, jurors in a Texas court found Micron ‘wilfully’ infringed upon the patents, ultimately determining that the chipmaker owes $425 million in damages for one patent and $20 million for the other.
In January, Google settled a $1.67bn TPU patent infringement case with Singular Computing; while April saw AWS ordered to pay $525m in damages to storage and data management company Kove, and HPE filed a lawsuit against Inspur alleging patent infringement and deceptive business practices.
Earlier this month, German high-performance computing (HPC) vendor ParTec filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, with the company alleging the tech giant violated three of ParTec’s patents when the tech giant built its Azure AI platform.
