Netlist, Inc. (NLST), announced it has filed legal proceedings for patent infringement against SK hynix in the courts of Germany and China based on the infringement of Netlist patents in those countries by SK hynix LRDIMM enterprise memory products. Netlist also recently filed a new lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California asserting two recently issued U.S. patents against SK hynix RDIMM and LRDIMM products.

The lawsuits in Germany and China are based on SK hynix's infringement of Netlist's patented distributed buffer architecture which was adopted as the industry standard for DDR4 LRDIMM. The German lawsuit, filed in Munich, targets the sale of SK hynix LRDIMM either alone or installed in enterprise servers. The lawsuit filed in Beijing, China targets the sale of SK hynix LRDIMM to enterprise customers in that country, and also the sale of the same products to server manufacturers that integrate SK hynix LRDIMM into servers for worldwide export.

"We filed new lawsuits in Germany, China and the U.S. in order to broaden our legal efforts to prevent SK hynix from continuing its pervasive and unauthorized use of Netlist's intellectual property," said Netlist Chief Executive Officer, C.K. Hong. "Despite our earnest and repeated efforts over the past year and a half to negotiate an equitable resolution, SK hynix refuses to fairly compensate Netlist and its shareholders for our valuable intellectual property." Mr. Hong added, "We remain open to negotiating a fair and reasonable license but absent a satisfactory resolution, we will take all measures necessary to defend our intellectual property rights."

Netlist previously filed suits last year in the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) and the Central District of California to address SK hynix's unauthorized use of Netlist's IP. In the ITC investigation, an Initial Final Determination from the Administrative Law Judge is expected no later than October 10, 2017.

In the Central District, the court is scheduled to conduct a claim construction hearing on July 27, 2017, for the Netlist patents asserted last year. SK hynix recently filed a motion in the Central District asking the court for a partial stay of those proceedings pending completion of Inter Partes Review of the patents asserted in that action. Any stay granted by the Central District, however, would only affect the proceedings in that court and would have no effect on the ITC or delay the issuance of the Judge's ruling in October.