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[September 2002]
Court Ruling Strengthens American Superconductor Patent Estate in HTS Technology
American Superconductor Corporation (Westborough, MA, USA) announced on 4 September 2002 that the US District Court in Boston had confirmed the breadth of a fundamental composition of matter patent, owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and exclusively licensed to AMSC, related to high temperature superconductor (HTS) wires.At the heart of the court's ruling, explained AMSC, is the breadth of the patent, which applies to any composite consisting of an HTS material in intimate contact with a noble metal, such as silver. The company and its competitors are employing such composites both in current manufactured HTS wire architectures and in new HTS wire architectures under development.
The inventors of the patent are Dr Gregory Yurek, formerly a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT and now chairman and CEO of AMSC, and Dr John Vander Sande, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT and a director of AMSC. Both are founders of the company.
The patent was issued in 1993 and expires in 2010. It was recently reviewed by the US Patent Office and the US District Court after the Patent Office declared an interference between the Yurek-Vander Sande patent and another US patent application. The scope of the Yurek-Vander Sande patent has now been reconfirmed in the process and the declared interference has been closed.
Yurek explained that the company's current HTS wire product is a composite of very fine filaments of HTS material - which is a ceramic compound - in a matrix of silver or silver alloy, which is called a multi-filamentary HTS wire architecture. He added: "This patent covers not only multi-filamentary HTS wire; it also covers HTS coated conductor composite wires, which we and others are developing.
"Coated conductor composite wires consist basically of a coating of the HTS ceramic material on a normal metal substrate with a layer of noble metal on top of the HTS coating. This patent covers both of these composite HTS wire architectures."
ENDS