Economy

Micron Technology was founded in October 1978 in Boise, Idaho.Micron is one of Idaho’s largest employers with more than 5,000 employees. The company went through a series of layoffs since 2005, when it had nearly 10,000 employees in Idaho.According to the company’s website, Micron has about 20,000 employees worldwide including locations in; California, Virginia, Canada, Puerto Rico, Italy, Scotland, Israel, Paris, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, China, India and Malaysia.Micron manufactures and markets DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash memory products, computer chips, which are used in everything from computing, networking, and server applications, to mobile, embedded, consumer, automotive, and industrial designs.According to its website, Micron Micron Technology, Inc., became a publicly held company in June 1984. In November 1990, Micron was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), where it began trading under the “MU” symbol. Effective December 30, 2009 Micron voluntarily transferred its stock exchange listing from The New York Stock Exchange to the NASDAQ Global Select Market, a market of The NASDAQ OMX Group, (NASDAQ: NDAQ) and continues to trade under the ticker symbol MU.

How Getting Sued By Harvard Might Affect Micron

Boise State Public Radio News

Published July 18, 2016 at 7:26 AM MDT

We learned last week that Harvard University is suing Micron Technology over patent infringement. Micron isn’t commenting on the suit. If it goes to court, the company will likely argue that the technology it uses is based on a patent it owns, not the one developed by Harvard.

Jim Feldhan says companies like Micron have portfolios of patents they call their war chests. Feldhan is president of Semico Research, a semiconductor industry consulting firm. He says the company will pull patents out of its war chest and hope one of them is older or relates more directly to what it’s doing than Harvard’s.

The technology in this particular lawsuit is used to create thin insulating layers in memory chips. We won’t try to parse the merits of the case. But we do want to know what this suit could mean for one of Idaho’s largest employers. So, what if Micron loses?

Feldhan says it could mean paying Harvard a little money or a lot. He says the amount of the payout would depend on how important the judge thinks the technology is to what Micron makes. If the judge says Micron violated Harvard’s patent, the company would then have to argue that the technology is not all that important.

Imagine you owned the patent for steel. You could sue Ford or GM for a huge amount because they could not have made anything in their history without steel. Feldhan says the technology at issue is important to Micron but definitely not as important as steel in making a car. He says it’s one of more than 300 steps in making a chip.

“Is it worth one-300^th of the value of the product? That’s what someone might argue,” Feldhan says. “The other side of the coin is, ‘well without this technology you couldn’t make the product, so you know it should be worth … 20 percent of the product.’”

But Feldhan says companies in the semiconductor industry operate on very thin margins, so even a relatively small payout could be a big hit to Micron. That’s one of the reasons he says, cases like this tend to stay in court for many years, as both sides wait for the other to give up.

Find Adam Cotterell on Twitter @cotterelladam

How Getting Sued By Harvard Might Affect Micron

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