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International Rectifier Wins $6.2 Million in Case against IXYS

October 11, 2005 by Jeff Shepard

Power semiconductor firm International Rectifier Corp. (IR, El Segundo, CA) announced that it has won $6.2 million in its patent case against IXYS Corp. (Santa Clara, CA), a supplier of high-power semiconductors and modules. A federal court jury in California found that elongated octagonal MOSFETs and IGBTs manufactured by IXYS infringed US patent 4,959,699 held by IR. IR said it expects IXYS to appeal the judgement, as it successfully managed last year, avoiding a $27 million payout to IR. In the latest jury trial, IXYS was found not to have infringed on two other IR patents (US 5,008,725 and US 5,130,767).

The dispute between the two companies, centered on their core MOSFET technologies, appears to run back to when IR Chief Executive Alex Lidow was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, working on a new breed of high-voltage HEXFETs. Stanford was linked to similar developments at Hewlett-Packard, where IXYS Founder and CEO Nathan Zommer was also working on the technology. However, IR seems to hold the fundamental patents on power MOSFETs, and has successfully sued firms over the years patent infringment, including IXYS and its Samsung foundry.