Seoul Semiconductor wins patent lawsuit vs Signify

Seoul Semiconductor Co., the world’s No. 3 light emitting diode (LED) display maker, said on Thursday it has won a patent litigation case against Signify N.V., a spinoff from Philips Lighting.

A local court in Düsseldorf, Germany on Dec. 17 dismissed Signify's patent invalidation action against the South Korean company’s LED technology, dubbed CRI 70.

It also ordered the Dutch company to recall and destroy all of its products using the technology, which it had been selling over the past seven years.

If Signify fails to comply with the court order, it should pay a penalty of up to 250,000 euros ($259,000) for each such product it sold.

CRI, which refers to color rendering index, is an indicator of how similarly lighting reproduces an object's actual color in sunlight.

For example, CRI 70 means that an object's color in lighting bears a 70% or greater match to its color under sunlight.

The patented technology is widely used in household lighting, vehicle lamps and backlights for IT devices.

Seoul Semiconductor holds about 18,000 patents. With the latest court case victory, it has won all of the estimated 100 global patent lawsuits it was involved in.  

Write to Ji-Hye Min at spop@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article.