Corning's long-running intellectual property (IP) dispute with China-based IRICO has entered a new phase after the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) issued what Corning views as a fair and critical Initial Determination in the company's trade secret case.The ruling marks a critical legal moment in Corning's broader effort to defend its display glass compositions and fusion manufacturing technology against IRICO's unauthorized use of Corning's patented technology, the misappropriation of trade secrets, like engineering drawings, and the deployment of Corning's proprietary technology across its manufacturing lines.For Corning, the dispute is not merely a matter of one product line or one regional market. It is a direct defense of research, process expertise, and IP that underpin its position in high-precision display glass. "This latest decision from the International Trade Commission is clearly affirms our unwavering commitment to innovation," said Brendan Mosher, International Vice President and General Manager, Corning Display Technologies."We believe strong intellectual property protection, fair competition, and trusted partnerships are fundamental to a healthy innovation ecosystem. As a 175-year-old company, Corning is continuously advancing and protecting innovation so our customers across Asia can collaborate with confidence and compete successfully in global markets."April Wins Set the StageThe July 24 outcome follows two important legal wins for Corning in April. On April 7, an Administrative Law Judge at the ITC issued an Initial Determination in a separate glass-composition patent case, finding that IRICO infringed both asserted Corning patents and that the patents are valid.The determination also recommended a Limited Exclusion Order against IRICO, including certification requirements and a prohibition on importing IRICO-manufactured LCD glass substrates that fall within Corning's proprietary composition space, as well as products, such as LCD TVs and monitors, containing such glass.Corning stated that it sought the ruling to protect its proprietary display glass substrates and technology and enforce its intellectual property against infringing products imported into the United States.Corning secured another favorable result in Europe. On April 16, a judge at the Unified Patent Court in Germany ruled in a composition patent case that IRICO infringed Corning's patent and further confirmed the patent's validity. The ruling allows Corning to seek damages and enforcement of an order that could block televisions using IRICO's infringing glass from entering Germany.Together, the April rulings gave Corning added legal momentum ahead of the July 24 trade secret determination and reinforced its stated position that its display glass IP portfolio remains valid, enforceable, and strategically important.Trade Secrets Case Expands the StakesThe trade secret case carries broader significance because it goes beyond a single glass composition. According to Corning, the company had expected a favorable result based on what it described as clear evidence that IRICO stole engineering drawings and improperly used Corning's proprietary technology across its manufacturing footprint.Corning also stated that the trade secret case is important because it could restrict imports of all IRICO glass compositions manufactured using Corning technology, including the 616 composition that closely mirrors Irico's 615 composition found to violate Corning's patents.With the latest ITC ruling now in place, the dispute moves from a composition-patent fight toward a broader question of manufacturing know-how.In advanced materials, this distinction matters. The value of a technology platform is rarely limited to a formula or a finished product; it is embedded in process control, equipment engineering, production discipline, and accumulated know-how developed over decades.A favorable trade secret determination therefore strengthens Corning's ability to argue that the dispute concerns the core of display glass manufacturing, not merely the outer boundary of one patent claim.IP Protection as an Industrial DisciplineCorning's robust legal defense reflects a broader IP philosophy. The company states that invention and innovation have been central to its success for 175 years, and that its leadership in the LCD industry is built on investment, innovation, collaboration, and trusted customer relationships.It also emphasizes that IP protection is not only about safeguarding invention; it is about defending the long-term R&D investment that enables industry-changing products, sustainable customer success, and technologies that enhance people's lives.With a global patent portfolio spanning more than 30 countries and decades of experience and investment in technology commercialization and compliance, Corning frames IP protection as a foundation for trusted innovation in high-standard global markets.This is also where Corning draws a hard line. Its IP philosophy states that when the company finds unauthorized use or misappropriation of its technology, it will take action and will not tolerate situations where its IP is compromised or infringed.And Corning's message to the industry is direct: advanced materials innovation depends on intellectual property protection and fair competition.From Fusion Process to Industry-Wide ImpactThe dispute ultimately points back to the technology at the center of Corning's display glass leadership: the fusion process. Developed more than 60 years ago, the process was created to solve one of the most difficult challenges in precision glassmaking — how to produce large, thin, exceptionally flat glass sheets at industrial scale without compromising surface quality.Unlike conventional glass-forming approaches that may require contact with forming surfaces or extensive post-processing, Corning's fusion process allows molten glass to flow over both sides of a forming structure, meet at the bottom, fuse in midair, and be drawn into a pristine sheet. Because the exterior surfaces remain untouched during formation, the process can deliver the surface quality, dimensional stability, and thickness control required for advanced display manufacturing.Over decades, this manufacturing platform became a key enabler of the flat-panel display industry. Fusion-formed glass helped support the transition from bulky cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays to thin, flat, high-resolution screens, while giving panel makers the precision substrate needed for increasingly complex LCD and TFT processes.Its impact was not limited to material performance. By enabling larger substrates, higher productivity, and more advanced panel architecture, the fusion process also helped change the economics of display manufacturing.For Corning, defending the IP behind fusion-based display glass is therefore not a peripheral legal exercise. It is a direct defense of the technological foundation that helped reshape the global display industry.

Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (TEEMA) on July 21 held an investment briefing in Taiwan on its Mexico science park plan, bringing together representatives from Mexico and Sonora state as it advanced a project aimed at helping Taiwanese small- and medium-sized enterprises expand overseas. The initiative was highlighted as part of a broader push to give smaller suppliers a more direct path into foreign markets.TEEMA said the overseas science park concept took shape two to three years ago after executives identified a gap between the support available to large manufacturers and the barriers faced by smaller firms abroad. The association said local governments overseas also have limited resources when courting investment, since officials must approach companies one by one and can only match with a limited number of firms.As a result, TEEMA wants to act as an intermediary platform that connects small businesses with resources while also easing the workload for host governments. The association said Mexico responded faster than other countries and showed the strongest support, making it the first location selected for the overseas science park plan.TEEMA outlined three priorities for the park: giving large, medium and small tenants similar treatment; creating a single service window so companies can handle permits and local government coordination more easily; and building Taiwan-style living services, including familiar food and daily amenities, to reduce adjustment costs for staff posted overseas. The association said the park is designed to bring together large companies, small firms, governments, financial institutions, and overseas partners into an industrial cluster that can lower barriers to overseas investment.The association also said the effort comes as global industry is being reshaped by geopolitics, tariffs, supply chain restructuring, and the rapid rise of AI. TEEMA said competition is increasingly determined by the integration of supply chains, manufacturing, energy, logistics, talent, and services, and that Taiwanese companies need to expand overseas together rather than operate alone to preserve global competitiveness.

"Integrated circuit" is a fancy term for the chips that control the electronics that make our modern life possible. They are composed of hundreds of thousands or even millions of tiny components, such as transistors, capacitors, and resistors. These components are so tightly linked together on a tiny piece of silicon that, for all intents and purposes, the chip is indivisible – you can't separate it into its individual components.Any mistake in a chip's circuitry could thus render the entire chip unusable. The process of transferring the as-yet theoretical chip design to the fabrication plant (also known as a foundry or chip fab) to produce a photomask (the template that will later be used to create chips en masse) is known as the tape-out, and costs in the tens of millions of dollars.So chip designers have a strong financial incentive to get their designs right on paper before any silicon is involved.But research conducted for Siemens in 2024 showed that only 14 per cent of chips experienced what is called first-silicon success – when the first tape-out results in a photomask and a physical chip that reliably works. This research also noted that this was the lowest success rate over the past two decades. One reason for that might be that many companies are now bringing chip design in-house instead of contracting out to experienced, specialised chip designers.That's where Vincent Bligny's company, Aniah, steps in.Based in Grenoble in the French Alps, Aniah uses artificial intelligence to conduct electrical rule checks (ERCs) for integrated circuits. These checks examine the electrical connections between different components and verify that the chip design can be made, will work, and will continue to work over time. For example, ERCs look for short circuits, when current flows with very little resistance between two components that it was not supposed to flow between; and they look for open circuits, the opposite of a short circuit, where the circuit is not a closed loop and current therefore cannot flow.ERCs also look for large voltage drops (often because of high resistance in the circuit), leading to overheating, noise, and reduced efficiency; and they look for voltage violations, where two components operating at different voltages are connected, potentially damaging the chip (level shifters are necessary to get around this problem). Traditional checkers, such as the industry-standard simulator SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis), examine how the chip might behave under different voltage, current, or temperature conditions. However, they are unable to sample every potential configuration of the circuit’s components and might miss corner cases (the rare cases where the parameters are at the limits of their expected range). Aniah's OneCheck, on the other hand, covers all of these potential configurations. If there are N components that can take on either high or law values (e.g., N power domains that can be switched on or off), OneCheck will examine each of the 2N potential states to make sure that the chip will still run correctly. It will go over all possibilities, catching problems such as conditional high-impedance (floating) nodes and electrical-overstress violations in chips that mix high- and low-voltage domains. Unlike traditional checkers, OneCheck doesn't depend on luck: it is a static, simulation-free method. Moreover, traditional checkers might find the first instance of a particular type of violation and immediately report back that this violation is present. The designer might fix this one violation, but many other instances of this violation could still remain. OneCheck, on the other hand, will look for all instances of the violation, so that the designer can fix them all at once and not have to rerun the checker.Not only is OneCheck more comprehensive than traditional electrical rule checkers but it is also faster, giving results in minutes instead of days. There is a trade-off, of course: OneCheck finds more false positives than traditional checkers. In other words, it flags more violations that really aren’t violations at all. However, this is something that most chip designers can accept, especially because of another product that Aniah released earlier this year, Amigo.Amigo is an AI agent that goes hand-in-hand with OneCheck. OneCheck flags potential violations and groups them into roughly fifty clusters, organised by their root cause. Amigo then provides users with an explanation of these violations, and takes advantage of natural language processing – users can simply enter "Explain this violation" – to allow users to query and thus debug these violations. But Amigo's support for chip designers goes further than that. It also provides concrete suggestions for how to fix the violations that it has identified, which the chip designer can then validate. It also tells chip designers which violations are the 'lowest-hanging fruit,' whose correction would lead to the greatest increase in the likelihood that the chip will be ready for tape-out. In fact, Amigo quantifies for users just how ready a design is for tape-out, and can quickly adjust this valuation when changes are made (instead of running the entire checking process from scratch).OneCheck and Amigo are therefore a newer, AI-enabled system for electronic design automation (EDA), and Aniah has ambitious plans for developing this EDA technology over the next two years.  They intend to implement parallel fixing by the end of 2026, where the checker can make corrections as it checks. This is a prelude to delivering results in just seconds by next year.Aniah next wants to go beyond OneCheck and simply electrical rule checking to full circuit sign-off – in other words, it wants to be able to verify that physical design constraints are respected. In the long term, Aniah wants to enable continuous sign-off, whereby all electrical rules and physical constraints are constantly satisfied. Currently, sign-off is a hectic scramble at the end of the design process, where bugs are easy to overlook.Their bronze award at the 2026 Best AI Awards came with a prize of NTD 500,000 (USD ~$16,000). The money itself won't help Aniah a lot – they've already raised more than USD $11 million in funding and expect to open a new funding round soon – but the award will open doors with Taiwanese companies and investors, said Allen Chen, Aniah's director of applications engineering. Chen, who is based in Taipei, added that Bligny, Aniah's CEO, has long held Taiwan's technical prowess in semiconductor manufacturing – its world-leading foundries and design houses – in high esteem. This is why Bligny plans on expanding their Taiwanese team, said Chen, who joined the company three years ago and is currently Aniah’s only employee on the island.Aniah currently has one Taiwanese customer, Novatek, but also supports the 200-strong Taiwanese team of Nvidia, an American company. These clients are loyal to Aniah because OneCheck and Amigo offer the fastest running time and the smallest number of false positive alerts, and because Aniah is quickly adopting AI to improve its service.The Best AI Awards celebrate global excellence in artificial intelligence and IC design, welcoming submissions from innovative companies and brilliant student teams. Following the success of the 2026 edition—advised by the MOEA, organized by DoIT, and executed by TCA—the prestigious competition is officially transitioning into an annual tradition.Offering substantial grand prizes and unmatched industry exposure, the countdown to Best AI Awards 2027 has already begun. Details on the next submission cycle, prize tiers, and eligibility rules will be released soon. Connect with us on LinkedIn for the latest official updates and application alerts.