Chinese Netac company sues American PNY

The Chinese flash memory company Netac has brought a suit for patent infringement against the American company PNY in the Eastern District of Texas.

Netac has two issued US patents. The more recent is US 6,829,672, issued December 7, 2004. The first claim of the '327 is:

An electronic flash memory external storage method, comprising the steps of:

establishing data exchange channel between a data processing system and a portable external storage device based on USB or IEEE1394 bus upon plug said portable external storage device into said USB or IEEE 1394 bus interface of said data processing system;

acquiring a DC power supply from said data processing system for said external storage device through said USB or IEEE1394 bus upon plug said portable external storage device into said USB or IEEE 1394 bus interface;

configuring a flash memory storage module built-in said external storage device, wherein the data storage structure of the flash memory storage module is arranged on a block basis;

directly accessing data or information in the said flash memory storage module based on USB or IEEE1394 bus standard through said established data exchange channel by implementing and processing the data access operation requests issued by users, wherein said data processing system assigning and displaying a device symbol for said external storage device and processing the operation request in magnetic disk operation format issued from users upon plug said external storage device into said USB or IEEE 1394 interface of said data processing system.

There is a claim of priority to Nov 14, 1999. No US patents cite the '672 patent.


The other patent is US 6,795,327, issued Sept. 21, 2004.

The first claim of the '327 patent states:

A semiconductor storage method supporting multi-interface, comprising steps:

(a) setting up a semiconductor storage device in which is installed a semiconductor storage medium module (10), a controller module (20) to control said semiconductor storage device, and an interface module (40) which supports at least two interfaces of different standards, wherein said interfaces of different standards include serial or parallel or wireless communication interfaces; physically, said modules can exist independently or they can be combined into one or two modules;

(b) connecting said storage device, through said interfaces of different standards, to at least one data processing system which has the corresponding standard interface;

(c) establishing information exchange channel between said storage device and said data processing system based upon said serial or parallel or wireless communication interfaces;

(d) said storage device exchanges data through said exchange channel with said data processing system and stores data from said data processing system into said semiconductor storage medium module (10); said data processing system can retrieve required data from said semiconductor storage device.

The underlying application was filed September 30, 2002, and claims priority to two Chinese applications.


To date, the '327 patent has been cited by ONE US patent, 6,842,794 (to Inventec).