Samsung is fined 275 million euros for infringement of memory patents

Samsung has been found guilty by a Texas court of infringing five different patents of American memory company Netlist. The South Korean tech giant must pay Netlist 275 million euros.

The jury’s verdict was unanimous that Samsung’s memory modules “willingly” infringed all five patents Netlist accused the chipmaker of. Netlist argued that Samsung violated patents in memory for cloud computing and other data-intensive use cases. According to the court, the patents were infringed in several types of Samsung’s DDR4 and DDR5 memory, in addition to Samsung’s HBM2, 2E and 3 memory.

Netlist is an American company that sells SSDs and modular memory subsystems for use in enterprise applications. The company sued Samsung in 2021 for patent infringement. A lawyer for Netlist argued that Samsung adopted its patented technology after the two companies collaborated on another project, writes Reuters based on court transcripts. Samsung argued that the patents were not valid and that its technologies worked in different ways than Netlist’s.

Netlist gets $303 million from Samsung. This amounts to 275 million euros. The company had asked for the equivalent of approximately 366 million euros.