Roughly a year after its litigation against Renesas Electronics ended, Xueshan Technologies Inc. has filed suit against Qualcomm (7:25-cv-00083). The plaintiff asserts six from the hundreds of patents that it received from MediaTek, described at the time as broadly concerning "power management integrated circuits, RF integrated circuits, embedded and NFC microcontrollers and image processors". The plaintiff accuses Qualcomm of infringement through the provision of certain Snapdragon processors—those "employing a LPDDR5/5X memory controller" and/or "dimming control functionality" through the AV1 standard or HDR10+ technology.
Through a series of December 2020 transfers, Xueshan acquired its patent holdings, including the patents asserted against Qualcomm (8,391,089; 8,395,946; 8,451,211; 8,462,846; 9,066,013; 9,813,730) from MediaTek. That acquisition was characterized as comprising roughly 2,000 patent assets. (The recorded total is around 1,000 US patent assets.) Xueshan's first suit over the received patents hit Renesas in May 2022 with a second suit filed in March 2023, both in the Eastern District of Texas. The set of nine asserted patents there does not overlap with the six here in suit.
There, Xueshan targeted the provision of a wide array of products, including converters, memory protection units, microcontrollers, and processors. Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne handed down a September 2023 claim construction order in the first case, turning away a couple of indefiniteness challenges from Renesas. By November of that year, the parties requested a stay of both suits in light of a "notice of resolution". The litigation officially ended in February 2024.
Formed in Delaware on December 17, 2020, Xueshan Technologies was formerly a wholly owned subsidiary of Quarterhill Inc. (f/k/a Wi-LAN Inc.), a publicly traded Canadian NPE. In April 2017, Quarterhill announced a restructuring of its business model, de-emphasizing patent licensing and refocusing on the acquisition of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) businesses. The company's name was changed from "Wi-LAN Inc." to Quarterhill the following June, with Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) continuing its operations as a "key subsidiary of Quarterhill focusing on patent licensing".
Then, in a June 2023 press release, the company announced that it had sold 90% of its patent licensing operation, via WiLAN, to Owlpoint IP Opportunities JVF LP, a joint venture between Arena Investors, LP and Owlpoint Capital Management, LLC, a pair of New York-based investment firms. WiLAN engaged Stout Capital to conduct valuation work with respect to this sale. In West Texas litigation filed by another WiLAN subsidiary, Collabo Innovations, Inc., related documents were produced to defendant AMD, documents that District Judge Alan D. Albright ordered outside counsel for AMD to preserve until a Dell motion to compel them in a case filed by yet another WiLAN plaintiff, Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc. (UCT), had been resolved.
Per Stout, its engagement with WiLAN ended in June 2023 as Quarterhill sold "all of its shares of WiLAN Inc." to Owlpoint IP "for gross proceeds of up to CN$71 million". In its response to Dell's motion to compel, Stout recounts a messy back-and-forth, both with counsel for Dell and with WiLAN, as well as shifting attorneys purporting to represent WiLAN, over WiLAN's objection to Stout's production of the valuation-related materials to Dell and any action that WiLAN would plan to take in support of that objection. Western District of Texas Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower ordered Stout Capital to produce the discovery to Dell by November 12, 2024.
In its corporate disclosure in connection with the new case against Qualcomm, Xueshan sums up its current ownership situation by stating that it is "a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wi-LAN Technologies Inc., which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wi-LAN Inc.", which is "owned by Owlpoint IP Opportunities JVF LP and Quarterhill Inc." On December 6, 2024, MediaTek assigned roughly three dozen patents to Interlink Silicon Solutions Inc., an entity created in Delaware on October 31, 2024. The Canadian address provided for Interlink Silicon is associated with WiLAN. No litigation has arisen from this divestiture (see here and here) as yet.
Xueshan is represented by Nelson Bumgardner Conroy PC. The case has yet to be assigned to a judge. 2/21, Western District of Texas.
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