In the cutthroat world of semiconductors, the patent wars never really stop. Netlist Inc. has filed fresh infringement lawsuits against Samsung Electronics, going after the South Korean giant’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DDR5 products that are critical for the exploding AI industry.
The complaints were filed in two places: the US International Trade Commission (ITC) and the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Netlist claims Samsung’s advanced memory tech steps on two of its patents.
One patent (No. 12,646,537) covers innovations in stacking memory chips using through-silicon vias (TSV), basically tech that helps pack more performance into dense memory packages while cutting down on power issues. The other (No. 12,650,937) relates to register clock driver (RCD) technology, which is important for making DDR5 memory modules (like RDIMMs and MRDIMMs) run smoothly at high speeds. These are exactly the kinds of components AI accelerators and high-end servers are hungry for right now.
The ITC case also names several big players who use Samsung’s memory: Google, Nvidia, Supermicro, and Broadcom. That includes stuff like Google’s TPUs, Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin GPUs, and various Supermicro servers. Netlist is pushing for import bans and cease-and-desist orders, which, if they win, could block these products from the US market and seriously mess with AI hardware supply chains.
This isn’t their first rodeo. Netlist, a smaller California company focused on memory modules and storage, had a licensing deal with Samsung back in 2015. Things went south around 2020, and it’s been a messy legal fight ever since. Samsung has already lost two big jury verdicts in Texas: $303 million in 2023 and another $118 million in late 2024 for willful infringement of other Netlist memory patents.
Samsung’s memory business has been one of its brightest spots lately, thanks to massive demand for HBM in AI training and inference. Companies like Nvidia can’t get enough of it. Netlist’s CEO, C.K. Hong, framed the lawsuits as necessary to protect the company’s innovations in the AI server memory space.
Memory tech is converging fast, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Samsung says its products comply with the law and will defend itself vigorously, as usual. The ITC tends to move quicker than regular courts, so we could see preliminary rulings with real commercial impact in the coming months.
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