IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) subsidiaries Longitude Licensing Limited and Marlin Semiconductor Limited (f/k/a Sandyford Semiconductor Limited) have begun litigating a portfolio of former United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) patents with a pair of complaints: the first, against Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm (1:25-cv-00215) in the Western District of Texas; and the second, against Lenovo (Motorola Mobile Communication), OnePlus, and TSMC (2:25-cv-00171) in the Eastern District of Texas. The five patents-in-suit are broadly directed to various aspects of semiconductor fabrication. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision and/or incorporation of semiconductor devices fabricated using "any of TSMC's 16nm and smaller process nodes", as well as "downstream products" (e.g., desktop computers, smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, and wearables) that incorporate such semiconductor devices.
Belonging to various families, the patents-in-suit (7,745,847; 9,093,473; 9,147,747; 9,184,292; 9,953,880) issued to UMC between June 2010 and April 2018 with an earliest estimated priority date in August 2007. Marlin Semiconductor received the patents in a portfolio of over 480 from UMC in a June 2021 assignment. For RPX coverage on that assignment, as well as an assignment of 15 patents from UMC to Marlin Semiconductor in October 2023, see "Marlin Semiconductor Tops Off Portfolio Acquisition as Other IPValue Litigation Rolls Along" (October 2023).
IPValue has been owned by private equity firm Vector Capital since 2014. Vector Capital, formed in 1997, bills itself as a "technology-focused private equity firm", touting current management of "over $4 billion in equity capital from a variety of investors including university endowments, foundations, financial institutions, and wealthy families". In 2016, it acquired Longitude Licensing, which was formed in Ireland in 2013 to apparently "acquire and commercialize a significant patent portfolio from Elpida"—a Japanese DRAM company arising from a merger between the memory operations of Hitachi and NEC that was acquired by Micron Technology in 2013. Marlin Semiconductor itself was formed in Ireland in 2020 as "Sandyford Semiconductor Limited". Irish corporate records reflect a January 2021 name change as well as an overlap in personnel with Longitude Licensing.
Through IPValue, Vector Capital holds thousands of US patent assets, including patents originating with AMD, Cypress, Elpida Memory, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, NXP, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, and Seiko. In late 2019, following years of quiet on the litigation front, IPValue—through controlled plaintiff Monterey Research LLC—initiated the first of several still-active campaigns asserting subsets of the thousands of patents that it had separately received over the years from Cypress. IPValue has been more active since, acquiring portfolios from Intel and UMC, suing over existing portfolios, and doling out some of its earlier-acquired assets to other NPEs; for details, see, e.g., here.
The new West Texas case has been assigned to District Judge Robert Pitman, and the East Texas case, to Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap. Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C. and/or Miller Fair Henry PLLC represent the plaintiff in litigation. 2/13, Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Western District of Texas; 2/13, Lenovo, OnePlus, TSMC, Eastern District of Texas.
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