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STEC, a designer, manufacturer and marketer of solid state drives (SSDs), said Tuesday that it has received notice of a lawsuit brought by Seagate Technology that allege the company of patent infringement. The company believes that accusations of the world’s largest maker of hard drives have no ground and will seek to prove this in court. In addition, it plans to seek termination of Seagate’s patents on certain technologies.

In particular, Seagate accuses STEC of violating four of its U.S. patents – 6,404,647; 6,849,480; 6,336,174; 7,042,664 – that cover solid-state mass memory storage device; surface mount IC stacking method and device; hardware assisted memory backup system and method as well as method and system for host programmable data storage device self-testing. All of the aforementioned patents were issued between 2002 and 2006, whereas STEC claims that it owned similar patents back in the nineties.

“Throughout our 18 year history, STEC has been diligent in its pursuit of industry-changing technology while entirely respectful of the intellectual property that has been developed by others. The allegation put forth by Seagate […] is simply not accurate nor in line with STEC’s long history of success and fair play in these markets,” said Manouch Moshayedi, chairman and chief executive of STEC.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage...te_Drives.html

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