SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY

Suit Award: Lifetime Memory Products, a small Huntington Beach maker of computer memory modules, said it has been awarded $450,000 by a Santa Clara County jury in a breach of contract lawsuit against Hyundai Electronics America in San Jose.

The suit alleged that during a worldwide shortage of a common type of computer memory chip in 1987 and 1988, Hyundai reneged on a contract to deliver 100,000 chips to Lifetime, then known as Columbus International. The chips were 64-kilobyte DRAMs, or dynamic random-access memory chips.

“Hyundai could have honored the contract but instead decided to withhold the chips and auction them off,” said Paul Columbus, president of Lifetime Memory, which has a dozen employees.

The suit, filed in Superior Court in San Jose in November, 1988, alleged that Lifetime received only 7,000 of the 100,000 chips that it ordered and that the rest were auctioned off at much higher prices, Columbus said.

Chris Berka, an attorney for Hyundai Electronics America, a marketing subsidiary of Hyundai Electronics International of South Korea, said the company acted in good faith and is considering an appeal. Hyundai was unable to supply the DRAM chips to Lifetime because of a production problem, Berka said. He noted that the court dismissed charges of fraud and bad faith and that the jury awarded less than half the $883,000 that Columbus International was seeking. The verdict was handed down Nov. 15.

Columbus said the $450,000 represents lost profits. Lifetime will seek to recover attorneys’ fees at a hearing scheduled for Jan. 3.