Intel Corp looks to have killed the threat to its microprocessor business from Taiwan by winning patent infringement suits over the only non-US cloner of the 80846, United Microelectronics Corp, which has agreed to stop making its UMC486 part. United, Taiwan’s second-biggest semiconductor fabricator, also withdrew its challenges contesting the validity of Intel patents in several Asian and European countries, and paid Intel’s expenses, which a spokesman said were less than $5m. United effectively admitted that its clones would not stand up to close scrutiny by labelling them not for sale in the United States, but it contested Intel’s patents in Germany, France, the UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Intel sued United Microelectronics and its distributors in Germany, the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore in June, and in July asked the US International Trade Commission to bar a United distributor from importing any UMC486s into the US. It looks as if the agreement ends United’s involvement in the iAPX-86 market; it is not clear whether the company’s microprocessor ambitions are exhausted, or whether it will seek to license a RISC design, such as PowerPC or Alpha.
