Harvard University has sued Samsung, alleging that the latter’s chip technology infringes two patents owned by the university.
The case is President and Fellows of Harvard College v. Samsung Electronics Co, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No. 2:24-cv-00636.
According to the Harvard Crimson, the university claims that Samsung’s processes for making microprocessors infringe on patents by Harvard chemistry professor Roy G. Gordon and four other inventors who were postdoctoral or graduate students in Gordon’s lab at Harvard.
Gordon worked for, and performed research in, Harvard’s Department of Chemistry for over 50 years.
As the Crimson explains,
Gordon — now an emeritus professor who formerly chaired the chemistry department — has pioneered research into the use of vapor deposition systems to make thin films. His work has generated 100 patents in his name as of 2016, including a window-coating developed in the 1970s that insulated houses and reduced energy consumption.
Harvard claims that the two patents at issue (United States Patent Nos. 7,973,189 and 7,560,581), for creating and using “cobalt nitride layers for copper” and applying chemical vapor deposition for a “metal-comprising layer” are infringed by Samsung’s use of films that contain cobalt or tungsten metals in microchips.
Claim 12 of the ‘189 patent recites:
The method of forming a metal-comprising layer by chemical vapor deposition comprising:
exposing a substrate to a gaseous mixture comprising vapors of one or more metal amidinate selected from the metals lithium, sodium, potassium, beryllium, calcium, strontium, barium, scandium, yttrium, lanthanum and the other lanthanide metals, titanium, zirconium, hafnium, vanadium, niobium, tantalum, molybdenum, tungsten, manganese, rhenium, iron, ruthenium, cobalt, rhodium, nickel, palladium, silver, zinc, cadmium, tin, lead, antimony and bismuth.
According to the complaint,
Samsung fabricates at least the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Generation 1 product (hereafter “Snapdragon 8”) using a Samsung process that practices each element of at least one claim of the ’189 Patent.
Harvard asserts that
Snapdragon 8 chips include metal-comprising layers formed by material deposition. For example, the metal interconnects in the Snapdragon 8 chips include metal-comprising layers formed by chemical vapor deposition.
The patents were assigned to Harvard, as is common for patents arising from university-funded research.
The complaint makes a point of mentioning that “Harvard is the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning and is recognized as one of the world’s leading academic institutions.”
The complaint alleges that Samsung has known about the ’189 Patent since at least September 16, 2014, because Samsung’s U.S. Patent No. 8,834,968 cites to the ’189 Patent.
Harvard claims that Samsung infringes claims of the ‘581 patent for a chemical compound and for the process of depositing that compound on a surface.
The university is seeking both damages and an injunction against future acts of patent infringement.
This is the third time that Harvard has sued technology companies for allegedly infringing patents based on Gordon’s work. The two previous cases, against semiconductor manufacturers Micron and GlobalFoundries, were settled.
Samsung has reportedly been sued more than 400 times for patent infringement in the past five years in the United States alone. More than half of these cases were brought by non-practicing entities (NPEs) – companies which own patents but don’t make items covered by the patent rights they own. NPEs are sometimes known by disparaging name of “patent trolls.”
According to the Korea Institute of Intellectual Property, “NPEs file 6.2 lawsuits on average for a patent. By contrast, manufacturing companies file 1.8 lawsuits per patent on average.”
Samsung appears to be an especially attractive target for patent infringement actions. In comparison, from 2019-2023, 168 patent infringement cases were filed against Google, 142 against Apple, and 74 against Amazon.
According to the Korea Economic Daily,
Samsung has become the No. 1 target among major tech companies given its variety of products ranging from semiconductors, smartphones, TVs and communications equipment that use a growing list of patents, industry officials said.
Samsung itself was awarded a total of 6,165 United States patents in 2023, the most of any company, according to Statista. This is almost twice as many as #2 patent-filer Qualcomm.
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