News

posted on 24 April 2008 08:20

Flash memory solid state drive (SSD) supplier STEC has engaged the legal services of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP (WilmerHale) to fight off the patent infringement suit against it by Seagate.

WilmerHale has a staff of more than 1,000 lawyers and successfully defended STMicroelectronics (ST) in two cases against it by SanDisk relating to flash memory circuits.

Manouch Moshayedi, STEC's chairman and CEO, defiantly said: "We are extremely confident in our technology and patents in the area of SSDs and IC stacking and equally confident in the abilities of our attorneys at WilmerHale. They have shown a consistent track record of success in litigation and defense of their clients over their 90-year history, and we believe they will do an excellent job defending our company against this lawsuit."

"We ... believe that the courts will side in our favor and find that our products were being manufactured and sold by us into the market long before any such patents were filed by Seagate as indicated, for example, by our product offerings that were listed in our initial Registration Statement on Form S-1 filed with the SEC on March 15, 2000."

Seagate is sueing STEC for infringing four Seagate patents dealing with how SSDs interface to a host computer and how errors are detected and corrected. The four patents in question are U.S. Patent Nos. 6,404,647 (issued in 2002), 6,849,480 (issued in 2005), 6,336,174 (issued in 2002) and 7,042,664 (issued in 2006). Seagate bought one of the patents above, referring to an SSD's 3.5-inch form factor, from HP.

We have a long and undubtedly hard-fought legal battle in store for us here.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}