Media coverage of Micron by the last few years has focused mostly on layoffs and glum financial reports, but some good news came for the Boise-based semiconductor giant by the past few months.

First, in May, Micron announced that a joint venture with Intel had produced the industry’s first (and so far only) sub-40 nanometer (nm) memory chip; soon after, early that month the company, with about 15,000 patents, placed second only to Intel on the Patent Board’s “Patent Scorecard.”

“At the end of the day it comes down to innovation,” said Micron spokesman Dan Francisco. “We’re continuing to design and innovate on the broader memory and imaging front as we have for years.”

The Patent Board, a leading intellectual property and patent portfolio analysis firm, releases its “Patent Scorecard” each year which is published in the Wall Street Journal. The 2008 edition of the report ranked 208 companies in the semiconductor category, going beyond pure numbers

of patents to include five criteria: Science Strength, Innovation Cycle instance, Industry Impact, Technology Strength and Research Intensity.

Micron’s Science Strength — which represents how much a company uses a combined measure of science and quantity in building its patent portfolio — was its highest score, actually beating Intel’s.

Its Technology Strength score — how many patents a company has and how strong they are — was additionally high, owing in large part to the pioneering strides it’s made with dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and NAND flash memory development.

“[Micron’s] total number of patents is what’s doing it; they have 30 percent more than IBM,” said Patent Board representative Christine Wren. “They may have some cutting edge things that are pulling their portfolio up.”

Assessing what it means however is another matter. Despite its strong standing among competitors in the DRAM and NAND space particularly, Micron has still suffered…

Orginal post by Mike

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