GlobalFoundries starts patent cases against TSMC and wants to block tech products
GlobalFoundries starts several patent lawsuits against competitor TSMC, because that company would infringe some of its patents. The American manufacturer also wants to block the supply of tech products equipped with chips baked by TSMC.
According to GlobalFoundries, Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC has infringed multiple patents when manufacturing chips. The American company claims that TSMC has produced semiconductors with infringing technology and wants the lawsuits to ensure that products equipped with them cannot be imported into the United States and Germany. The manufacturer also demands compensation, although it is unknown how high the damage amount is that GlobalFoundries demands.
The American chip manufacturer has published a document that indicates that it concerns sixteen different patents; three of them are registered in Germany and the rest in the US. It deals with a number of different topics, including a method of forming a finfet devices with a shared gate structure and the introduction of metal impurity to change the work function of conductive electrodes.
GlobalFoundries claims that TSMC infringes its intellectual property in its 7nm, 10nm, 12nm, 16nm, and 28nm process. The manufacturer is also targeting other companies. For example, Apple, Broadcom, Mediatek, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Xilinx are named as fabless chip designers. In addition, companies such as OnePlus, TCL, Motorola, Lenovo, HiSense, Google, Cisco and Asus are mentioned. Depending on the outcome of the lawsuits, the sale of products from these companies may be prohibited. These import bans would only apply to the United States and Germany. This could be, for example, smartphones from Apple and video cards from Nvidia.
According to Gregg Bartlett, a vice president of GlobalFoundries, TSMC has illegally reaped the benefits of multi-billion dollar investments made by his company for years. He says his company has invested heavily in the US and European semiconductor industries and that the lawsuits are aimed at protecting this manufacturing base in the West. GlobalFoundries says it aims to ensure that semiconductor manufacturing remains a competitive industry for customers to benefit from.
A year ago it became clear that GlobalFoundries had stopped developing its 7nm process. The company also stopped developing 5nm and 3nm nodes and focused on perfecting the existing 12nm and 14nm designs. The company, which has split from AMD in the past, was unable to compete with Samsung and TSMC in developing these smaller nodes.