UMC and Micron reached a settlement to end the four-year tug-of-war

Reporter | Peng Xin Edit |

On November 26, UMC and Micron jointly issued an announcement that UMC and Micron Technology today announced that they have reached a global settlement agreement, will withdraw their lawsuits against each other, and UMC will pay Micron a confidential settlement fee, both sides said in the statement, looking forward to reaching mutual business cooperation opportunities in the future.

Micron said it will continue to drive innovations that are critical to the data economy, and intellectual property protection is an important cornerstone of Micron's competitiveness. UMC said that there are currently 12 fabs with a total monthly production capacity of about 800,000 8-inch wafers, and while providing competitive products and services in various fields, UMC will continue to implement and optimize the protection of business secrets. UMC stressed that the settlement had no significant financial impact.

UMC is a major semiconductor wafer foundry in the world, focusing on chip manufacturing and embedded non-volatile memory for logic operations. According to research and investigation institute Jibang Consulting TrendForce data, UMC wafer foundry market share is the world's third, reaching 7%, second only to TSMC, Samsung; UMC also competes fiercely with another wafer foundry company, Gromfounds, for market share.

Micron has a place in the DRAM space. According to a market research firm Counterpoint report, Samsung ranks first in the market with a market share of 41.5%, SK Hynix ranks second with a market share of 29.3%, Micron ranks third with 23.4%, and the top three manufacturers collectively capture 94.2% of the DRAM market.

The case stemmed from the cooperation between Fujian Jinhua and UMC. In May 2016, Fujian Jinhua signed a technical cooperation agreement with UMC to develop DRAM-related process technology. Jinhua pays the technical remuneration, and the DRAM technology developed will be jointly owned by both parties.

However, Micron believed that UMC and Fujian Jinhua had stolen their trade secrets, and Micron filed a lawsuit against both parties, which also triggered a lawsuit against both of them by the US Department of Justice.

However, on October 21 last year, UMC reached a $60 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. A year later, UMC reached an out-of-court settlement with Micron today, which means that the four-year legal tug-of-war between the two companies has finally come to an end.