Samsung Electronics Co. (SSNLF) is in a little more trouble with Apple Inc. (AAPL) after having a patent complaint filed by Apple amended with an extra 14 products alleging that the South Korean-based company copied, including the design of new releases of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy S II.
Apple stated in the suit that Samsung “blatantly” copied the design of the iPhone and iPad for use in the Samsung product family. The Calif.-based Apple first sued Samsung in April, alleging that Samsung had “slavishly” copied devices. Samsung fought back with a patent infringement complaint of its own.
Apple’s original complaint landed at 38 pages in length but with the additional claims spiked up to 63 pages.
A portion of the complaint reads, “The copying has been widely observed in the industry and has been mentioned in multiple articles reviewing Samsung products.”
Samsung Austin Semiconductor LP currently operates with a workforce in Austin of about 1,000 while Apple employs approximately 1,000 people in the Austin area as well.
As a chip-maker, Samsung Electronics Co. is Asia’s largest producer of semiconductors. The company, which first opened a plant in north Austin in 1997, built a second one in 2007 and announced in May 2010 that an additional $3.6 billion would be invested for the most recent expansion of its 12-inch semiconductor fabrication plant. This brings the total invested by Samsung in its Austin plant to more than $9 billion. According to the company, which is based in Suwon, South Korea, this makes it by far the largest foreign investment in Texas and one of the largest single foreign investments in the United States.
The new unit should be in full operation by late 2011, and likely will add approximately 500 jobs to the plant, growing the Austin site to about 1,500 employees, many of them engineers and technicians. Samsung also plans to hire 3,000 construction workers and equipment vendors until the project is complete.
The major investment will be used to manufacture large scale integration chips, or LSI chips, in a move that more than doubled spending to about $8.7 billion on Samsung’s international semiconductor business for 2010 and is designed to meet demand for chip use in smart phones, cameras and appliances. LSI is the process of placing a large number of circuits on a small chip, and is currently in high-demand to produce advanced logic devices. Currently, the plant produces NAND Flash memory chips with production slated to continue.
Samsung Austin Semiconductor is the company’s only semiconductor manufacturing plant located outside of South Korea.
Would you like all your dreams to come true? Follow Marc Speir on twitter @truthorcon.
