Roughly one week after suing Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm in a Western District of Texas complaint and Lenovo (Motorola Mobile Communications), OnePlus, and TSMC in an Eastern District of Texas complaint, IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) subsidiaries Longitude Licensing Limited and Marlin Semiconductor Limited (f/k/a Sandyford Semiconductor Limited) have filed a complaint before the International Trade Commission (ITC) (337-TA-3809), naming those six defendants as proposed respondents. At issue are the same five semiconductor fabrication patents, with the defendants targeted over non-x86 semiconductor devices (defined as devices "other than those which are made by or for" AMD and Intel), including semiconductor wafers or semiconductor dies manufactured outside the United States using TSMC's 7 nm and smaller process nodes, as well as products containing such semiconductor devices—including circuit boards, integrated circuits, "network units", personal computers, smartphones, smartwatches, and tablets.
Belonging to various families, the five patents-in-suit (7,745,847; 9,093,473; 9,147,747; 9,184,292; 9,953,880) issued to United Microelectronics Corporation (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 a subsequent 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). The plaintiffs allege that all defendants infringe the '847, '473, and '292 patents, with the '747 and '880 patents asserted only against Apple, OnePlus, TSMC, and Qualcomm—though the IPValue plaintiffs state their intent to add claims asserting those patents against Broadcom and Lenovo should discovery reveal that certain "products containing semiconductor devices manufactured using TSMC's 3 nm process node".
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 plaintiffs plead that the domestic industry requirement is satisfied by the US activities of its licensee, Intel. 2/18, ITC.
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