Back in November 2019, Bell Semiconductor, LLC (Bell Semic) began litigating the patents that the Hilco Inc. (d/b/a Hilco Global) company acquired from Broadcom, asserting nearly 20 assets from that acquisition, in overlapping sets, against Renesas (IDT), TI, NXP Semiconductors, and Microchip Technology (in that order). This past February, the only remaining open case in that campaign, the one against NXP, was stayed pending resolution of related inter partes reviews (IPRs). Bell Semic has now fired off a new round of complaints—filed in multiple judicial districts separately against AMD, Analog Devices, Infineon Technologies, KIOXIA, Marvell, Micron Technology, NVIDIA, NXP (again), Qualcomm, and Socionext and filed in the International Trade Commission (ITC) together against each of those companies as well as Acer, Bose, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), SMC Networks (d/b/a IgniteNet), and Suteng Innovation Technology (d/b/a RoboSense)—this time over a single patent generally related to "inserting dummy metal into a circuit design". Targeted throughout is the respective provision of semiconductor devices manufactured using certain design tools provided by various third parties, including Cadence Design Systems, Siemens, and/or Synopsys.
Comprising a family of one, the asserted patent (7,007,259) has a grant date of February 2006 with estimated priority in July 2003. Bell Semic acquired the '259 patent among thousands picked up from Broadcom in December 2017, at the same time that sister LLC, Bell Northern Research, LLC (BNR), picked up its large portfolio of assets from the same source. Currently available USPTO records suggest that Bell Semic now holds over 3,400 US patent assets, the Broadcom divestitures joined by a handful of assets transferred from ROHM in 2020 and nearly 60 patents acquired from STMicro last October.
Aside from those supplemental acquisitions, patents now held by Bell Semic (and BNR) originated with one of the various entities (e.g., AT&T) feeding patents into Agere Systems (a Lucent Technologies spinoff that was acquired by LSI in 2007), LSI itself (later acquired by Avago Technologies, which then acquired Broadcom, in 2016, renaming itself "Broadcom" thereafter), Renesas Electronics (certain assets of which were acquired by Broadcom in 2013), or Broadcom itself. In its complaints, Bell Semic pleads connections back into the Bell Labs history. The '259 patent issued to LSI. These new complaints appear to mark its debut in litigation.
In its ITC complaint, Bell Semic pleads satisfaction with the domestic industry requirement through the activities of its licensee, Broadcom, charting the Broadcom SAS3908A0-2 Mass Storage Controller (manufactured using "including use of the Cadence Virtuoso and Innovus layout tools") against the '259 patent to clear the technical prong.
The plaintiff identifies some of the accused products in proposed respondent pairs: the SMC Networks MetroLinq 2.5G Outdoor 60GHzPTP + 5GHz radio as IgniteNet's accused product, accused because of its alleged inclusion of the NXP accused devices, the NXP LS1043A Quad-Core Networking Processors (for IgniteNet and NXP); "the Acer Aspire 5 (A515) device that incorporates the infringing AMD Ryzen 5 device" (for Acer and AMD); the Bose audio amplifier model number 992 035 223 E allegedly incorporating the ADSP-21487 audio signal processor device of Analog Devices (for Bose and Analog Devices); RoboSense's RS LiDAR-M1 sensor system allegedly incorporating the Marvell 88E1512 Single Chip Ethernet transceiver device (for RoboSense and Marvell); the Moto G Stylus device in the United States that purportedly includes a Snapdragon 665 Qualcomm device (for Lenovo, Motorola Mobility, and Qualcomm, further accusing the 5G RF Transceiver SDR865 device of Qualcomm).
Bell Semic identifies individually the rest of the accused products for each of the remaining proposed respondents: the Micron DM02A1 Solid State Drive Controller; the NVIDIA GV100-400-A1 device; the Infineon AURIX TC277T64F200SCA Microcontroller; Kioxia's TC58NC0L1XGSD PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD Controller device; and SocioNext's SynQuacer SC2A11 High-efficiency, Multicore ARM Processor.
Bell Semic has disclosed Hilco Patent Acquisition 56, LLC; Hilco IP Merchant Capital, LLC (apparently doing business as "Hilco IP Merchant Banking"); and Hilco Global as its corporate parents and, previously, as the only nonparties having an interest in the outcome of its litigation (filed in response to an order entered by the court to do so). Hilco Global is a financial services conglomerate, based in Chicago, owning a broad array of companies. Hilco IP Merchant Banking (also identified as "Hilco IP Merchant Banking, LLC") is a Hilco IP investment, advisory, and monetization operation led by CEO Michael Friedman, with past work at Ocean Tomo, and John Veschi (COO), Gillian McColgan (CTO), and Afzal Dean (Chief Licensing Officer), each having worked at both the Rockstar Consortium and Marquis Technologies, the latter described by Veschi as "a full-service IP and technology consulting business" and acquired, per McColgan, by Hilco in 2016.
In January 2018, Bell Semic, BNR, and Hilco Patent Acquisition 56 granted a security interest in over 3,700 patent assets, including the issued patents now asserted, to unnamed "Secured Parties" through a document signed on behalf of those parties by Cortland Capital Market Services, a Chicago-based investment servicing company (and a subsidiary of global private equity firm Alter Domus).
Identifying the same parentage as has Bell Semic, BNR has been litigating its former Broadcom patents since 2018. This past September, the NPE filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) against proposed respondents BBK Electronics, BLU Products, HMD Global, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), OnePlus, Sonim, and TCL (TCT Mobile) (337-TA-3568). District court cases were already underway against several of these companies, with litigation filed by BNR then active against Apple, CommScope (ARRIS; Ruckus Wireless), Dell, and HP as well. (Prior litigation against several other defendants, including Huawei, Kyocera, LG Electronics, and Samsung, had by then already closed.) The NPE's infringement allegations throughout have targeted device (e.g., smartphone) compliance with various 802.11 networking standards, the incorporation of heat spreaders, proximity sensors, alarm systems, and more. Dismissals have since ended litigation with Apple, CommScope, Dell, and Lenovo.
As noted, Bell Semic began its earlier campaign in 2019, targeting the provision of various semiconductor devices (e.g., controllers, MCUs, processors, SOCs, transceivers, etc.). Its cases against IDT, Microchip Technology, Renesas, and Texas Instruments were dismissed with prejudice between March and July of last year, each with earlier court filings referencing settlements. Only the NPE's case against NXP—transferred in June to the Austin Division of the Western District of Texas (also moving the case away from District Judge Alan D. Albright to District Judge Lee Yeakel)—remains "active", albeit stayed to await the outcome of those IPR proceedings.
In its new complaints, Bell Semic pleads willful infringement against some of the defendants, based on meetings purportedly held prior to the filing of these April 27 complaints. For example, as to NVIDIA, the NPE alleges that "[o]n January 10, 2022, John Veschi, Sailesh Merchant, and Kouros Azimi of Bell Semic conducted a meeting over Zoom with Richard Calderwood and David Zviel of NVIDIA. During the meeting, the Bell Semic personnel presented a slide deck addressing the '259 patent. More specifically, the Bell Semic personnel walked through infringement of the '259 patent and explained that the patent was infringed by a number of NVIDIA devices".
In addition to claim charts, declarations from Lloyd Linder, "an expert in the field of semiconductor device design", is attached to each complaint to "further describe" the alleged infringement of the '259 patent (for example, with respect to KIOXIA, available here). 4/27, AMD ( 1:22-cv-10632), Analog Devices ( 1:22-cv-10633), Infineon Technologies ( 1:22-cv-10634), Marvell Technology ( 4:22-cv-10635), NVIDIA ( 4:22-cv-10636), District of Massachusetts; KIOXIA ( 2:22-cv-00726), Eastern District of California; Micron Technology ( 1:22-cv-00192), District of Idaho; NXP ( 3:22-cv-00594), Qualcomm ( 3:22-cv-00595), Southern District of California; Socionext ( 2:22-cv-10906), Eastern District of Michigan; 4/28, Acer, AMD, Analog Devices, Bose, IgniteNet, Infineon Technologies, KIOXIA, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), Marvell, Micron Technology, NVIDIA, NXP, Qualcomm, Robosense, Socionext ( 337-TA-3617), ITC.
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