Micron announces a global settlement agreement with UMC

Micron announced that it has reached a global settlement agreement with UMC. According to this agreement, both parties will withdraw the lawsuits filed against each other worldwide, and UMC will pay Micron a lump sum payment. This amount will settle claims related to Micron’s DRAM process technology, and the amount is unknown. Micron said that there will still be opportunities for cooperation between the two parties in the future.

Although both Micron and UMC did not disclose the specific amount of this payment, Micron eventually had to disclose it in its financial report, and the result was still impossible to conceal. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against UMC in November 2018. The content is that the key intellectual property rights and trade secrets needed to produce DRAM have been illegally obtained. However, in October 2020, the two parties reached a settlement agreement of $60 million.As early as 2017, Micron filed a lawsuit against UMC due to related issues, stating that the other party poached engineers from its Taiwanese subsidiary and requested the specifications and other features of Micron’s manufacturing technology. Then UMC also made a counterattack, accusing Micron of infringing its authorized patents. With the US Department of Justice and UMC reaching a settlement, the four-year intellectual property dispute between Micron and UMC has also been resolved.