Company: TSEM
Filing Date: 2025-04-30
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001178913-25-001537
Chunk: 149

Company: TOWER SEMICONDUCTOR LTD
Filing Date: 2025-04-30
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 4
Chunk 149
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, Israel.
 

 PROPRIETARY RIGHTS
 
Our success depends in part on our ability to obtain patents, licenses and other intellectual property rights related to our production processes. To that end, we have obtained certain patents, acquired patent licenses and intend to continue to seek patents for our intellectual property.
 
As of December 31, 2024, we held 272 patents in force. We have entered into various patent and other technology license agreements with technology companies, including Synopsys, ARM, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and others, under which we have obtained rights to additional technologies and intellectual property.
 
We constantly seek to strengthen our technological expertise through relationships with technology companies. We seek to expand our core strengths in CMOS image sensors, non-imaging sensors, embedded flash, power management, AI, RF, SiGe, MEMS, mixed-signal and Silicon Photonics (SiPho) technologies by continuous development in these areas and wherever possible, patent our new developments on a continuous basis. 
 
Our ability to compete depends on our ability to operate without infringing upon the proprietary rights of others. The semiconductor industry is generally characterized by frequent litigation over patents and other intellectual property rights. Like many companies in the semiconductor industry, we have from time to time received communications from third parties asserting that their patents cover certain of our technologies or alleging infringement of intellectual property rights. We expect that we will receive similar communications in the future. Irrespective of the validity or the successful assertion of such claims, we could incur significant costs and devote substantial management resources in defending such claims.
 
To partially mitigate the risk of patent litigation, we entered into License on Transfer (LOT) agreements with three leading companies in the semiconductor industry. These agreements provide protection against patent infringement claims from non-practicing entities (NPEs), ensuring that any patents transferred by these industry leaders to such entities cannot be asserted against us.
 
 DESIGN ENABLEMENT
 
To better serve our customers’ design needs using our specialty foundry technologies, we have entered into agreements with leading providers of physical design libraries, mixed-signal and non-volatile memory design components. These components, such as standard cells, interface input-output (I/O) cells, software compilers for on-chip embedded memory arrays, mixed-signal and non-volatile memory design blocks, device modeling, and automated design verification, are basic design building blocks. For optimal performance, all of these components must be customized to work with our operational processes. These pre-validated components may be incorporated into specific aspects of our customers’