Craig,
The real issue is not the transistor level technology, NAND or AND style, but the basic flashdisk patent.
From the press release:
The patent, "Flash EEPROM System" (U.S. patent 5,602,987) was issued Feb. 11, 1997. [SNDK] said that customers who buy Lexar products and customers who build electronic products with Lexar devices may also be infringing patent 5,602,987. 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).
Let's see, Lexar must have a really smart engineer to get around the patent and also have good lawyers. Or, they have mediocre engineers and a mediocre lawyer who says fight. Let's see again, Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, etc. all decided to pay. Do you think they too have inferior engineers or just bad lawyers?
I will put my money on SNDK. But I'll be watching this closely.
Rex
$15
PS, taking a beating these days... |
