Semiconductor Patent Litigation Trends Upward as Top NPE Plaintiffs Acquire and Assert Chip Patents

RPX data show that patent litigation asserting semiconductor patents has increased gradually but steadily over the past few years. In particular, litigation involving chip patents dipped in 2017-2018 but swung back upward in 2019 and 2020. Notably, the share of semiconductor litigation filed by NPEs has risen significantly during that time, accounting for 55% of the defendants added to such campaigns in 2018 but rising to 76% in 2019 and 80% in 2020.

NPE semiconductor litigation already filed in 2021 suggests that this trend is likely to continue. For instance, Liberty Patents LLC, an NPE with ties to several other litigating plaintiffs, launched a campaign over clock generators in January and added another suit the following month. Additionally, on February 2, Sonraí Memory Limited, one among a growing web of Irish NPEs backed by hedge fund Magnetar Capital, filed its first litigation over server processors. Weeks later, Sonraí launched a second campaign, targeting mobile devices incorporating certain types of digital signal processors (DSPs) and flash memory chips.

Prolific litigant IP Edge LLC, the top plaintiff in 2020, has also entered the fray, asserting patents acquired in November from IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) subsidiary Monterey Research, LLC. On January 30, two IP Edge affiliates—Lazer IP LLC and Viewpoint IP LLC—launched their first campaigns over subsets of those assets, targeting semiconductor design systems (Lazer IP) and integrated circuits and oscilloscopes (Viewpoint IP). Also launching a campaign that same day was IP Edge’s Westwind IP LLC, targeting flash storage and display technology and asserting a patent acquired last October from sister IPValue subsidiary Longitude Licensing Limited instead. These campaigns follow several others launched by IP Edge last year over patents acquired from IPValue NPEs, including one through Celebration IP LLC, targeting chipsets that control the discharge of lithium ion batteries; another through Forutome IP LLC, targeting devices that feature a programmable tri-state buffer; through Heritage IP LLC, devices with systems-on-chip (SoCs) that feature PoR generators and/or Brown Out Reset capabilities; and through Pearl IP Licensing LLC, devices that feature processors with Resource Power Management (RPM) circuits (each asserting patents obtained from Monterey).

Other NPEs that have also filed semiconductor litigation this year include Computer Circuit Operations LLC, which in early February added a new wave of cases to the ongoing DDR memory campaign that it launched in 2019; and inventor-controlled Light Speed Microelectronics, LLC, which in January filed its first litigation over processors that employ a Pattern Matching Engine (PME).

Moreover, several other NPEs have also acquired semiconductor patents that they have yet to litigate, teeing up the launch of even more campaigns. One of those entities is Future Link Systems, LLC, another IPValue subsidiary. After filing its first infringement suit in late 2020, targeting certain processors and graphics cards, Future Link acquired additional patents from the same source—NXP Semiconductors—in mid-January, suggesting that it may soon file even more cases. Also notable are two late-December assignments recently made public by the USPTO from Teleputers, LLC to Coresecure Technologies, LLC, two NPEs apparently controlled by the same Princeton professor. While Coresecure has not yet filed any litigation, Teleputers kicked off a semiconductor campaign of its own in June 2020.

For more on market sector trends, including a similar deep dive on litigation in the automotive sector, see RPX’s fourth-quarter review.