"You should consider this to be the last six-month extension of the discovery stay," the report quoted Judge Phyllis Hamilton as saying during a case management hearing Thursday.

The private lawsuit, by numerous memory-buying companies who are seeking class action status for the case, alleges memory makers operated a cartel to keep prices high between November 2001 and June 2002, the report said. The plaintiffs are looking for unspecified monetary damages, it added.

The memory chipmakers had previously been ordered to turn over to the private plaintiff's attorney copies of all the documentation previously sent to the federal grand jury. So far the attorneys have received more than 2.5 million grand jury documents have been received, the report said.

The report did not say which memory makers are part of the antitrust lawsuit or which ones are under investigation by the U.S. government, although according to past reports the latter include South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Hynix Semiconductor Inc., Micron Technology Inc. of the United States, and Europe's Infineon Technologies AG, amongst others.

As part of the U.S. government investigation a former Samsung sales manager, denied a federal grand jury access to papers, and risked being charged with contempt of court, according to reports of a hearing in April 2004. The DOJ previously succeeded in winning the cooperation of a former Micron sales executive, Alfred Censullo, who had agreed to plead guilty to obstructing the probe, according to reports in December 2003.

By: DocMemory
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