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13 June 2019Patents

Samsung fails to have semiconductor patents invalidated

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit yesterday, June 12, handed Samsung a defeat after it refused to invalidate a series of patents covering a stage in the semiconductor manufacturing process.

Samsung, as well as Micron Technology and Korean semiconductor supplier SK Hynix, petitioned the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) from 2017 to 2018 seeking the cancellation of 11 patents owned by Delaware-based Elm 3DS Innovations.

Elm sued each of the three companies for patent infringement in 2014 in the US District Court for the District of Delaware. The cases are still continuing.

The Korean telecommunications company had argued before the PTAB that the patents should be invalidated as obvious owing to prior art.

The PTAB instituted inter partes review of the patents, before concluding that a person of ordinary skill in the art would not have been directed towards the claimed inventions.

The 11 patents related to a “stacked integrated circuit memory”. Samsung argued that the claimed inventions were already disclosed in either a 1996 paper entitled “Real-Time Microvision System with Three-Dimensional Integration Structure” by computer scientist Kee-Ho Yu; or two separate patents covering semiconductor manufacturing (referred to in the judgment as “Bertin” and “Leedy” respectively).

According to the PTAB, however, Samsung failed to meet its burden of proof in demonstrating that the claimed inventions were obvious.

In yesterday’s judgment, the Federal Circuit backed the PTAB decision, finding that Elm’s claimed method of producing a dielectric, an insulator used in electric circuits, was not invalidated by the prior art.

Samsung claimed that a person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to substitute “plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD)” for the thermal oxidation method of producing the dielectric claimed in the 11 patents.

The Federal Circuit, however, accepted expert testimony that “the dielectric produced using PECVD would not be sufficiently pure”.

“The board’s finding that PECVD is ‘quite different’ from thermal oxidation is supported by substantial evidence,” the Federal Circuit said.

Samsung also claimed that it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to “replace Yu’s silicon dioxide and processes for forming it with the dielectric and deposition process taught by Leedy”.

The Federal Circuit backed the PTAB’s ruling that the “petitioners failed to meet their burden for substantially the same reasons” as those raised in the PECVD argument.

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