Sector: Semiconductors

The National People’s Congress (NPC) – China’s legislature – convened in Beijing this week for its annual meeting. While its counterpart sitting in Washington DC mulls over its own patent reform proposals, the NPC has the prospective overhaul of…

06 March 2015

Barely a quarter of 2015 has passed and we have already seen four significant M&A events take place in the microchip industry. The latest (and largest of 2015, to date) was revealed at the start of this week, when the Netherlands’ NXP Semiconductors…

05 March 2015

Hon Hai (Foxconn) chairman and founder Terry Gou gave some insight into his company’s falling patent application rate while speaking at a Lunar New Year ceremony in Taipei yesterday. Statistics from the Taiwan IP Office (TIPO) suggest that the…

27 February 2015

A Texas jury decision to award damages of $533 million against Apple for infringing three patents owned by NPE Smartflash Technologies has rightly attracted a lot of headlines. It might be the world’s biggest company but a decision that may see the…

26 February 2015

In the wake of the US$975 million fine and other sanctions for anti-competitive patent licensing activities imposed on Qualcomm by the Chinese authorities earlier this month, there has been a surge in discussion about the country’s burgeoning…

23 February 2015

The huge popularity of post-issuance proceedings has been one of the biggest changes in the patent market following the introduction of the America Invents Act in 2011. The uptake of inter-partes reviews (IPRs), in particular, has been well…

19 February 2015

A new report by technology consulting firm iRunway has thrown a spotlight onto the patent landscape in the semiconductor memory sector. It looked at the largest patent holders, the growing presence of NPEs and the increase in patent litigation over…

17 February 2015

Details of the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission’s settlement of its antitrust probe of Qualcomm emerged last week, with the US company slated to pay a $975 million fine and facing significant limitations on its patent licensing…

16 February 2015

Qualcomm confirmed this week that it has reached an agreement with China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which recently completed an antitrust investigation into the US company’s patent licensing activities in the country. Under…

12 February 2015

The People’s Daily and the Intellectual Property Publishing House – a media arm of China’s State IP Office (SIPO) – recently released statistics showing which entities were granted the most Chinese patents in 2014.The grant data below relates…

02 February 2015