The Semi Interesting Podcast with Nathaniel Lucek and Elizabeth Morris

Much of a company’s innovation is based on its talent.  If you look at recent news, the semiconductor industry needs more talented people.  But life disruptions can derail a promising student from being an engineer, scientist, or technician in the semiconductor industry.  Scholarships won’t cover things like needing new tires for your car, covering the cost of a funeral of a family member, or othe...

Approximately 86% of high-tech IP litigation involves a non-practicing entity. Unfortunately, challenging the NPEs forces companies to make a decision: why should my company pay the costs of a challenge when my competitors benefit? Enter Unified Patents, which helps members deter invalid or unsubstantiated patent assertions. Elizabeth and Nathaniel were joined by Sasha Sokhis from Unified Patents...

The United States is one of the largest non-European filers at the European Patent Office, with around a quarter of its total applications in 2024. That means semiconductor companies need to consider European patent rules and procedures as part of their filing strategy. On this episode, Elizabeth and Nathaniel were joined by Phil Sanger from Grey Wolf IP in the United Kingdom to learn about some i...

Companies from across tech industries have been carefully watching Europe’s Unitary Patent system since its 2023 launch.  A Unitary Patent offers simplicity and reduces the administrative burden for applicants.  You manage one patent, pay one renewal fee, and have one legal system to deal with.  You also can obtain a single injunction across 18 European countries.  However, there is a risk.  A com...

Things at the USPTO are slowing down. Patent pendency, or the time from filing a patent application to substantive examination, is increasing based on the USPTO’s own statistics. The USPTO has reduced its staff, including the elimination of an entire regional office. The USPTO is also eliminating telework, which many patent practitioners fear will further reduce headcount and lead to further delay...

The threat of an infringement lawsuit is never far from the mind of an in-house attorney in the semiconductor industry. After all, companies in the semiconductor industry are known for extensive patent portfolios. Recent plaintiff demands and verdicts have been huge. Enhanced damages for willful infringement (i.e., treble damages and attorney fees) are enough to bankrupt some. Opinion letters from...

Spares and consumables are a huge part of the price for any piece of semiconductor capital equipment.  They can also be difficult to protect.  Knock-offs are common, which reduces revenue for tool manufacturers and potentially causes reliability problems.  Michaël De Vroey from European law firm Simont Braun joined Nathaniel Lucek and Elizabeth Morris to share the European perspective on design pr...

There has been a lot of press about the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which was designed to revitalize the US semiconductor industry.  Not surprisingly, other parts of the world also want to fund domestic semiconductor production.  Demonstrating that global objective, we learn more about the European Chips Act on this episode.  Europe recognized the strategic importance of the semiconductor industry...

Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), or patent trolls, seem to be lurking everywhere.  The semiconductor industry is not immune from their threats.  Yet the semiconductor industry also helps fuel their threat through patent transfers.  Patents from companies both big and small end up in the hands of PAES, which perpetuates the problem across industries.  Enter LOT Network, a group that helps its memb...

There have been countless articles about how trade secrets can lose protection if they are used to train artificial intelligence.  But what about some of the other impacts that AI may have on trade secrets as AI becomes more prevalent.  For example, what happens to the value of your trade secret if AI can approximate it?  Trade secrets must derive value from their secrecy, so this means a trade se...

Thanks to the CHIPS Act and other global pressures, there is a surge of new semiconductor fabrication plants popping up across the United States. While that’s encouraging news for the industry, it also presents some challenges for human resources departments. Aside from simply filling the available jobs, teams are also faced with numerous other challenges once the hiring bonanza at a new facility...

Regardless of the type of business or industry, employers understand that employees may encounter confidential information that should be handled carefully. That is especially true when trade secrets are involved, in which case, protecting sensitive and confidential information is of paramount importance.   It’s easy to label something as confidential, but in order to successfully uphold that desi...

We’ve made great strides increasing diversity in innovation. This is essential to a company’s success.  Yet, some groups as still underrepresented in the intellectual property process. That’s where the Diversity Pledge comes in. The Diversity Pledge helps companies better understand their strengths and weaknesses as they try to improve their statistics through best practices. The companies also sh...

Australia is a big country (a continent, in fact), but it’s position in the global semiconductor market is not nearly as large.  Even though the Australian semiconductor industry is small, nestled in the country’s unique patent examination system is a pathway to accelerate examination of your global patent portfolio.  Expedited examination in Australia is free and can be requested in many situatio...

While the knockoff concerns and “packaging” are a little different, the underlying legal problems are surprisingly similar between the semiconductor and toy industries. Both have extremely complex supply chains. Knockoffs in either space can lead to costly reliability and quality problems. For both, IP is one of the most valuable assets and represents thousands of hours of development and market r...

Companies can’t escape AI.  It’s in the news.  It’s being added to existing software products we use.  It’s being pitched to solve all sorts of problems.  AI seems like it will play a big role in R&D, legal, HR, and other fields, but how will it be implemented?  What should companies be doing during adoption and testing?  What are the risks?  Rather than ask ChatGPT, Elizabeth Morris and Natha...

Board members and consultants receive lots of high-value information from your company to do their job.  They also can work with more than one company, so that amount of high-value information is multiplied.  Not surprisingly, that makes them very attractive as a target for hackers and criminals.  But you must carefully balance cybersecurity protection against making large changes to their softwar...

Cost can be a limiting factor (or even THE limiting factor) when considering a patent infringement lawsuit. Staying under a million dollars in legal spending can be considered a victory of sorts for complex matters. That is a huge impediment to small companies and entrepreneurs. On this episode, we explore an alternative that may help level the playing field across high-tech industries: litigation...

Business executives and patent practitioners tend to have similar negative feelings around patent trolls and their letters offering to license sometimes dubious IP. These patent troll entities tend to file a large volume of nuisance lawsuits, which increases legal costs for companies. No industry is immune and these lawsuits impact companies at all levels of semiconductor manufacturing. But beside...

The process to file US patent applications online has been almost the same for the past 10-15 years. That filing process finally changed in January 2024 when the USPTO started requiring new U.S. nonprovisional patent applications be uploaded as DOCX files to avoid a surcharge. The DOCX requirement, which was postponed repeatedly, caused an uproar in certain corners of the U.S. IP world. But what d...

Belgium is known for many products: chocolate, beer, waffles, and many others.  Folks in the semiconductor industry also recognize that it is a leader in semiconductor research.  But why is that?  How did such a small country position itself to have an outsized role in this industry?  To answer these questions, Nathaniel Lucek and Elizabeth Morris were joined by John Baekelmans, a former VP at IME...

The spares business is an essential revenue stream for semiconductor capital equipment manufacturers. While these components typically are not easy to protect with a utility patent application, many of them are ideal for design patent protection. Nathaniel Lucek and Elizabeth Morris were joined by Charles Rauch, head of the design patent practice at Hodgson Russ LLP, to talk about the benefits of...

Applications for artificial intelligence at work seem boundless. AI could even write this episode summary (it didn’t, but maybe it should have). However, using AI carries risks to intellectual property protection, confidentiality, and bias. Look no further than the chip manufacturer that shared confidential information with ChatGPT to find a fix. On this episode, Nathaniel Lucek and Elizabeth Morr...

Project management and team building are vital when running an in-house legal team. Sadly, those are not skills that are tested on the bar exam. In this episode, Nathaniel and Elizabeth are joined by Sean Blixseth, Managing Senior Counsel at Panasonic to learn about best practices when inserting legal into a product team. They discussed the importance of living in the business, embracing project m...

Companies in the semiconductor industry need to gather invention disclosures from all corners of the company to help maintain a competitive advantage. Yet studies have shown that participation among different groups of inventors can be uneven, which leads to underrepresentation by certain groups. For example, the USPTO has shown that women are 20% of the technical workforce, but only 10% of invent...