Professor Gertrude Neumark Rothschild has reached a settlement with Mitsubishi Corp. regarding her assertion that the company and dozens of other major electronics manufacturers in Asia and Europe violated her patents for producing LEDs and laser diodes in products, such as video players that are used for Sony's Blu-ray format, Motorola Razr phones and Hitachi camcorders, backlighting for computers, as well as street lighting and optical storage of information.
Mitsubishi is the latest company to reach a global settlement with Rothschild, a professor emeritus at Columbia University. Others who have settled include BenQ, Dalien Lumei, Epistar Corp., FOREPI, Guangzhou Hongli, Hitachi, Hugo Optotech, LG, Motorola, Pioneer Corp., Samsung Electro Mechanics, Samsung Electronics, Sanyo Electric, Sewa Electric, Sharp Corp., Shenzhen Unilight, Showa Denko, Sony Corp., and Sony Ericcson. Earlier settlements were made with Nichia Chemical and Koninklijke Philips Electronics, which included Philips Lumilid Lighting Co. and Toyoda Gosei Co. Ltd.
Rothschild's attorney said the terms of the Mitsubishi agreement are confidential. The aggregate received from her settlements and licenses - which now have been concluded with more than 40 companies - amounts to over $27 million, he said.
Professor Rothschild, who is the sole owner of U.S. Patent Number 5,252,499, as well as the recently expired `618 patent and foreign patents related thereto, is currently Howe Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at Columbia. She was issued two U.S. patents in the early 1990s that cover methods of producing wide band-gap semiconductors for LEDs and LDs.
