Conflicts between contract manufacturers of semiconductors are not that frequent, and earlier we had to talk more about cooperation, but now the number of large players in the market for these services can be counted on the fingers of one hand, so the competition is moving to the plane, which implies the use of legal means of struggle. GlobalFoundries yesterday TSMC in the misuse of sixteen of its patents related to the manufacture of semiconductor products. The lawsuits were filed with the US and German courts, and the defendants are not only TSMC, but also its customers: Apple, Broadcom, Mediatek, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Xilinx, as well as a number of consumer device manufacturers. The latter include Google, Cisco, Arista, ASUS, BLU, HiSense, Lenovo, Motorola, TCL and OnePlus.
The misused GlobalFoundries designs were allegedly used by TSMC in 7nm, 10nm, 12nm, 16nm and 28nm process technologies. Regarding the use of the 7nm process technology, the plaintiff has claims against Apple, Qualcomm, OnePlus and Motorola, but NVIDIA is considered in the context of the use of 16nm and 12nm technology. Given that GlobalFoundries is demanding a ban on the import of relevant products into the US and Germany, NVIDIA is risking the entire range of modern graphics processors. Apple's position is no better, as it is mentioned in the lawsuit in the context of using TSMC's 7nm, 10nm and 16nm technologies.
In its press release, GlobalFoundries claims that over the past ten years the company has invested at least $15 billion in the development of the American semiconductor industry, and at least $6 billion in the development of the largest enterprise in Europe, inherited from AMD. According to the representatives of the plaintiff, all this time TSMC "illegally used the fruits of the investment." The politicized language calls on the judiciaries of the United States and Germany to stand up for the production base of these two regions. At the time of publication of the material, TSMC did not respond to these allegations.
This is not the first conflict between TSMC and GlobalFoundries in the legal field - in 2017, the latter complained about the practice of the former's relationship with customers, which implies monetary incentives for loyalty. In 2015, the South Korean company TSMC accused a former employee who got a job at Samsung of stealing industrial technology. The manufacturer of lithographic equipment ASML was also involved in a scandal this spring with accusations of several employees of the American division of industrial espionage. It was believed that representatives of China could be interested in the leak of lithographic technologies.
Source: 3dnews.ru