Samsung Electronics has been ordered to pay US$400 million after a US court found it had infringed a patent owned by the licensing arm of a South Korean university. Samsung said it would appeal.

Qualcomm and GlobalFoundries were also found to have infringed the patent, but weren’t ordered to pay damages.

The dispute centres on technology known as FinFet, a type of transistor that boosts performance and reduces power consumption for increasingly smaller chips.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology claimed Samsung was dismissive of the FinFet research at first, believing it would be a fad. That all changed when rival Intel started licensing the invention and developing its own products.