Isn't this interesting:
Monday March 23, 7:05 pm Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SanDisk Files Patent Infringement Claim Against Lexar Media in Federal
District Court
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 23, 1998--SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK - news) announced today
that it has filed a complaint in federal court against Lexar Media, Inc., Fremont, CA, for infringement of a fundamental solid state
flashdisk patent that SanDisk holds.
The action was filed March 23, 1998, in the U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco.
The patent, ''Flash EEPROM System'' (U.S. patent 5,602,987) was issued Feb. 11, 1997.
SanDisk officials said they have been in cross-licensing negotiations with Lexar but that the two companies were unable to come
to an agreement. They also said that customers who buy Lexar products and customers who build electronic products with Lexar
devices may also be infringing patent 5,602,987.
Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO and president, said, ''Lexar is using Sandisk's patented innovations in an attempt to unfairly appropriate
some of SanDisk's business. Since our formation in 1988, we have invested hundreds of man years and over $40 million to develop
the flash storage card market with the underlying technology. ''We have offered a patent cross-licensing agreement to Lexar under
reasonable terms, but Lexar has rejected the agreement. SanDisk has no alternative but to vigorously protect our intellectual
property rights through the legal system.
''In the last two years, we have signed patent cross-licensing agreements with Intel, Sharp, Hitachi, Samsung and Toshiba. Our
strategy has been and is to license our patents to enable an open, competitive market for flash cards.''
The patent teaches and claims important aspects of the emulation of a magnetic disk drive in removable flash memory cards, the
so called flashdisk and CompactFlash(tm).
The removable flashdisk memory card claimed in the patent appears to the computer, digital camera or digital recorder to be
completely identical to the industry standard magnetic disk drive although the flash memory is solid state, has no moving parts, is
extremely compact and rugged and consumes negligible battery power. Therefore it is ideally suited to be a universal digital storage
device.
Also pulled this from Lexar's web site (www.lexarmedia.com):
Paul McGuire, former member of the sales management team at SanDisk has been appointed vice president of sales. During McGuire's six and one-half years at San Disk he held various positions including
distribution Sales manager, western regional sales manager and marketing manager. Prior to SanDisk, McGuire was principal marketing manager for flash memory products for Fujitsu Microelectronics, and was a director on the board of PCMCIA. He received his B.A. in electrical engineering from Dublin University, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Looks like they raided SNDK for talent too.
I believe this is the company discussed several weeks ago on the thread in regard to a fast controller for CF - claimed sustained write rates of over 1mg/second. |
