NEC Corp and Hyundai Electronics Industries Co Ltd have signed a cross-licensing agreement to share each other’s patents, ending a two-year-old dispute involving seven separate cases. NEC filed the initial complaint back in 1997, but Hyundai countersued and won the first major battle last December, when the Eastern District Court of Virginia ruled in its favor over technology used to improve the efficiency of making connections in semiconductor circuitry within in 16Mb, 64Mb and 128Mb DRAM devices (CI No 3,564). That settlement was estimated to be worth between $100m and $200m for Hyundai. But now Hyundai says it’s agreed to a patent sharing proposal from NEC. In return for access to NEC’s memory technology, Hyundai will share both its own memory technology plus wiring and circuitry.
