Defendant
1 case as defendant.
I'll research this company before drafting.
WaferTech LLC — company profile
Overview. WaferTech, LLC was formed in June 1996 as a joint venture to build a US wafer fab in Camas, Washington (5509 NW Parker St), with TSMC holding ~57% and Altera, Analog Devices and ISSI holding the rest. Commercial production began in October 1998. TSMC bought out the other partners by Q1 2001 and has owned 100% since 2010; in December 2023 the entity was formally renamed TSMC Washington, LLC, and the WaferTech name was retired. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of TSMC (TWSE: 2330; NYSE: TSM) and files no separate public financials. The site (TSMC's "Fab 11") employs roughly 1,000–1,100 people; a 2025 Oregonian report noted 2024 sales fell more than 30% and the unit posted a $32 million loss.
Operations. WaferTech is an operating company: a pure-play semiconductor foundry performing contract wafer fabrication, along with related mask, probing and test support, for fabless design houses and IDMs. Its fab runs 200 mm (8-inch) wafers on trailing-edge nodes of roughly 0.35 µm down to 0.16 µm — technology from the late 1990s. It is TSMC's only US wafer fab, on a ~260-acre site.
Litigation posture. Operating company on the defensive. Across the tracked data it appears once, as a defendant, and never as a plaintiff. In Chien-Min Sung v. Kinik Company et al. (D. Del., filed Aug. 8, 2014, No. 1:14-cv-01027), WaferTech was named alongside Taiwan-based CMP consumables maker Kinik. Plaintiff Chien-Min Sung is an individual Taiwan-based inventor who has repeatedly asserted CMP pad dresser patents; WaferTech appears to have been named as a downstream user of Kinik's tools rather than as a competing supplier. The venue was the District of Delaware, not a plaintiff-friendly Texas district.
Context. The case was stayed in January 2016 pending parallel Taiwan litigation between Sung and Kinik. A companion Delaware suit (Sung v. Kinik and Intel, 1:14-cv-01026) asserted the same U.S. Patent 8,777,699, whose instituted claims were held unpatentable in IPR2014-01523. Sung later sued Samsung and Texas Instruments (E.D. Tex., 2023) on related CMP dresser patents.
Dr. Chien-Min Sung sued Kinik Company and Wafertech LLC in the District of Delaware asserting three U.S. patents. The court stayed the case on January 20, 2016, and later administratively closed it pending Taiwan ownership/rights litigation and appeals. The narrative does not itemize the three patents and cannot confirm that US 7,762,872 was among them.