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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (5476)	4/17/1999 2:10:00 PM
From: David W. Tucker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 60323

Aus: If you can dig up the patent number that is at issue in the suit, I can tell you exactly what's going on. You can probably get this faster than I can. As I recall, the Samsung suit was all about a very fundamental EEPROM patent covering very broad semiconductor structure/manufacturing aspects that everyone has come across eventually in their research as being the only way to go for making flash memories. Hitachi, Sony and others followed the suit very carefully and caved in once the court found the patent valid and Samsung infringing. After that, we had a slew of cross licensing agreements finalized. In the present case, I believe the issue surrounds a couple "disk emulation" patents in which an EEPROM array is divided into a plurality of "sectors" and controlled in a way which "emulates" a disk drive, so that the memory "appears" to be a disk drive to the user. There is a huge body of art in this area now, but Sandisk was the first to develop it. I believe this is the technology involved in the suit, but I might be wrong. Let me know if you can dig up the patent number. It's important to note that Flash memories are perfect for any attempt to emulate a hard drive with a semiconductor device. There are many environments where people would love to replace their hard drive with a rugged semiconductor device and I feel this is an important part of Sandisk's technology, although it's not showing up on their balance sheet as of yet. Imagine travelling around the world with a laptop that doesn't have any moving parts except for the keyboard? They already use such devices in the laptops used on the Space Shuttle. dave