Mimir IP, a South Korean patent management company, bought around 1,500 chip-related patents from SK hynix in May. They have now filed a lawsuit against the U.S. memory company Micron, accusing it of using these patents without permission, TrendForce reported. If Mimir wins, they could get up to USD 480 million in damages. The lawsuit, filed on June 3, also targets Tesla, Dell, HP, and Lenovo for using Micron's products. The patents in question are related to circuits, voltage measurement devices, and non-volatile memory devices.

The case is being heard in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas and the US International Trade Commission. This is the first time a South Korean company that acquired patents from domestic chipmakers has filed a lawsuit against a US semiconductor company. Officials from the involved companies have not commented. Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix have been changing how they deal with their patents recently, so this is not really a surprise move. In March 2023, Micron transferred over 400 chip-related patents to Lodestar Licensing Group. In June 2023, Samsung transferred 96 US chip patents, including the right to file patent infringement complaints, to IKT, an affiliate of Samsung Display.

Cooler Master has sued SilverStone, Enermax, and their common OEM, the Guangdong China-based Apaltek, for patent infringement of designs of their all-in-one, closed-loop liquid CPU coolers. The company has moved the United States District Court in the Central District of California, against the three companies for alleged IP violation in the design of its AIO CLCs. Cooler Master alleges that the three companies violate U.S. Patent numbers 10,509,446; 11,061,450; and D856,941 held by it. The infringing products referenced in the Lawsuit are SilverStone IceMyst 240, PF240, PF240W, IceGem 360, VIDA 240 Slim, and RGB Controller, and the Enermax Aquafusion ADV, Liqmax III ARGB, Liqtech 360 TR4 II Slim, and RGB Controller. Apaltek doesn't have any products in the retail channel under its own brand, but is being sued as the original technology supplier for SilverStone and Enermax.

Specifically, the Cooler Master suit alleges that the pump-inside-radiator design choice is a Cooler Master invention; as is the ARGB mini-controller. It also alleges infringement in the essential design of the coolers. It seeks damages and legal costs in Relief. One of the three defendants has reached out to TechPowerUp with a comment, in which it says that it finds it interesting that Cooler Master, which itself defended a similar patent infringement lawsuit against Asetek in 2016-17 would go on to allege patent infringement with smaller competitors such as Enermax and SilverStone, while leaving out certain other customers of Apaltek, such as MSI. They stated that they intend to defend their designs in the Court. This defendant termed Cooler Master's behavior as being that of a "bully."All pages from the Cooler Master lawsuit follow.

Lian Li Industries has filed a legal case against Phanteks Europe/Axpertec Inc. at the US District Court (Central District of California)—they allege in their patent suit that the Phanteks D30 RGB cooling fan series infringes on a June 2020 registered design (US patent 10,690,336 B1). Notice was initially sent out back in May of this year, but Phanteks appears to have ignored those early warning signs and continued to market and sell its D30 RGB products. Lian Li believes that Phanteks has copied their simple and compact connection method of daisy chaining RGB fans—as featured on the UNI FAN lineup. The P28 120 mm model was semi-recently awarded with a highly recommended verdict.

TechPowerUp reviewers have not had the chance to have a poke around with any Phanteks daisy-chainable D30 RGB fans, but a quick comparative glance between relevant product pages reveals a little bit of "inspired-by." The September 8 filing has Lian Li seeking damages to date—upon a successful outcome (in their favor). Additionally Phanteks will be required to pay a license fee if it decides to keep its D30 series alive post-case conclusion. Corsair and Thermaltake have also produced fan products with daisy-chaining connectivity—iCUE Link and SWAFAN EX respectively—could these manufacturers be targeted in the near future?

NVIDIA has been patent-trolled sued over patent-infringement by Xperi, parent company of Invensas Corporation and Tessera Advanced Technologies. Xperi alleges that NVIDIA violated five of its U.S. patents, bearing numbers 5,666,046; 6,232,231; 6,317,333; 6,849,946; and 7,064,005, which mainly deal with the physical and electrical innovations behind packaging of NVIDIA GPUs (mating of the die with a substrate that has a ball/pin-grid that interfaces with the PCB). NVIDIA designs the GPU die and hands over its packaging requirements to TSMC. The Taiwanese semiconductor fabrication giant oversees both the manufacturing of the GPU die, as well as its packaging. Despite this technicality, Xperi alleges that NVIDIA is responsible for the design of the overall GPU, including its package, and must answer for its wrongdoing.

Xperi is not your average back-alley IP hoarder technology inventor. The San Francisco-based company won IP disputes with several semiconductor giants, including Samsung Electronics and Broadcom. In both cases, Xperia won settlements, making it a giant-killer given its roughly $1.2 billion-market cap. In his Q1 2019 Earnings Call, Xperi CEO Jon Kerchner stated "...Today we filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA for patent infringement. We believe that NVIDIA is using our patent semiconductor technology in certain of its CPUs and processors and we have been speaking with NVIDIA for several years about taking a patent license. We ultimately could not reach an agreement and we felt that we needed to take this action to defend our intellectual property rights. We filed the case in Delaware Federal Court asserting 5 patents."

ZeniMax Media Inc. has been awarded a $500 million settlement in a virtual reality (VR) patent dispute with Facebook-owned Oculus. A jury in Texas found Oculus in violation of VR patents held by ZeniMax. Oculus in 2014 was acquired by Facebook in a $2 billion deal. ZeniMax owns id Software, a pioneering game studio led by John Carmack. ZeniMax alleges that core components of Oculus Rift VR headset were developed by John Carmack, when he was working at a ZeniMax subsidiary, making them ZeniMax' intellectual property. Carmack left ZeniMax to work for Oculus in 2013.

The ongoing patent dispute between NVIDIA and Samsung over mobile SoC patents, in which NVIDIA fired the first shot, is not going to well for team-green. With Samsung counter-suing NVIDIA over infringing its own bouquet of patents, NVIDIA is staring at a possible sales ban. A United States International Trade Commission (US-ITC) judge held that NVIDIA is violating at least three Samsung patents.

This decision is due for review in a few months from now. If upheld, NVIDIA is staring at a sales-ban on all products violating the three Samsung patents. Luckily for NVIDIA, one of the three patents expires in 2016, and the sales-ban could last a few months, at best. NVIDIA predictably stated that it is disappointed in the decision. Samsung hasn't commented.

Apple seems to have a revolving door for legal actions as of late. Today the Chicago Tribune is reporting Apple has asked a federal court in California to block Samsung from selling its new Galaxy Nexus smartphones, which use Google's newest version of Android, called Ice Cream Sandwich, alleging four patent violations including new features such as a voice-command search function.

Galaxy Nexus, the official debut of which was delayed by Samsung in October to pay respect to Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs, is the first phone running on the newest Android version before the platform is widely adopted by hardware manufacturers such as HTC Corp and Motorola Mobility. HTC and Motorola are also in separate patent disputes with Apple. In a lawsuit filed last week in San Jose, Apple said the Galaxy Nexus infringes on patents underlying features customers expect from Apple products. Those include the ability to unlock phones by sliding an image and to search for information by voice.

These are some lively times at Apple's legal department. The company is locked in intellectual property disputes with multiple companies, in multiple countries. Some of these are familiar foes such as Motorola Mobility and Samsung, others regional and lesser-known. The one thing patent disputes do, to all parties involved in them, is dent PR. Every legal dispute attracts or at lease leaves scope for bad press, and more often shapes public opinion against the disputing parties.

Apple learned a new trick in the trade which at least two recent events with very different outcomes, may have helped shape. First, it recently thwarted display IP infringement claims by S3 Graphics thanks to timely help by GPU supplier AMD, and second, it suffered a setback with regards to some brand names claimed by Chinese company ProView. You see, the ups and downs of IP disputes can have some very varied effects on the company's image. Apple's new trick is simple: make a different company, with a much different brand name, to handle those IP disputes on behalf of Apple, so brand Apple isn't directly dragged into the mess. Enter your friendly neighbourhood patent-troll, Digitude.

Here's a development that will bring joy to those that prefer to hear mechanical noises from their hard discs instead of the inky silence of the new solid state drives. The current perpendicular magnetic recording technology used in today's hard discs are due to hit a brick wall within a couple of generations or so. This will finally give SSDs the chance to make mechanical drives obsolete once and for all when their capacities increase and the prices drop. To get around this, TDK intend to use lasers coupled with a high coercivity material to achieve this capacity improvement. The coercivity value of a material is a measure of how difficult it is to magnetize ie how strong the magnetizing field needs to be. A material with low coercivity, is easy to magnetize, but it can also lose its magnetic imprint (north and south domains) easily, especially with densely packed data and is easy to erase with stray magnetic fields and to some extent, physical shock. Conversely a material with a high coercivity value can be damned hard to magnetize, but will keep its magnetic imprint much more stably and crucially for data storage, can retain much smaller magnetic domains, giving rise to greatly increased storage capacity for all that ever increasing avalanche of crucial data, such as music files, dodgy videos and humungous video game installs.