Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) has decided to put special marks on its chipsets destined for the US market to stress that these products are not manufactured on the disputed SiON process, which Taiwan-based foundry United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) claims violates its patent.
SiS's decision was a response to the import restriction order issued by the US International Trade Commission (ITC) on October 7, which will bar SiS from delivering chipsets that are related to the process in question into the US.
Besides branding special marks, SiS said that it is also planning to appeal to the ITC, offering further clarification about the matter.
Although US Customs will not execute the order until it receives the official papers, SiS's motherboard clients have been wary of the possible impact, now that the motherboard industry is entering its traditional high season. However, SiS maintains that with the special marks, the order will not affect its shipments, and it is still optimistic about its October shipment performance.
At present, SiS's motherboard customers include all four first-tier manufacturers, among which Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) has the highest ratio of SiS-based products. Despite its product proportion, ECS said that it expects limited impact from the restriction order, as in the Americas it mainly targets Central and South America. Gigabyte Technology expressed a similar opinion, as its OEM client IBM has not adopted SiS chipsets and SiS's products only account for a limited part of its own-brand lines.
Comparatively, Asustek Computer and Micro-Star International (MSI) held a more low-profile attitude towards the issue and did not comment further on the chipset supplier's latest move. For the two board makers, their SiS-based products in the US market are mostly orders for major OEM companies like Sony, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell Computer and Gateway.
The restriction order was the result of a patent infringement lawsuit filed by UMC a in federal court in San Jose, California on December 4, 2000, which was then followed by the launch of an ITC investigation on February 27, 2001. In a preliminary decision issued on May 6 this year, the ITC found that the UMC patents in question were not valid.
However, in the final determination released on October 7, the ITC changed its ruling on one of the 29 individual claims and issued an order to restrict imports of SiS's products relating to that claim.

Source: DigiTimes

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