Lucio Development LLC v. Texas Instruments Incorporated

The last of its January 2019 wave of cases having ended in dismissals in late April, Lucio Development LLC has sued Ambiq Micro (1:19-cv-00661), Ittiam Systems (6:19-cv-00282), Microsoft (6:19-cv-00283), Renesas Electronics (1:19-cv-00663), and Windbond Electronics (Nuvoton Technology) (1:19-cv-00662) over the same embedded software patent. Throughout the campaign, the NPE has targeted the defendants’ provision of software development kits (SDKs) (e.g., Microsoft’s Azure IoT Hub software development kit).

Multiple Delaware NPEs under the same apparent control have each taken over the litigation of patents—earlier passed to a Texas entity for assertion—after the patents have boomeranged back. Most recently, Circuit Ventures LLC assigned a family of circuit monitoring patents to Texas entity Wireless Monitoring Systems LLC, which asserted them in litigation from November 2016 to January 2019 before assigning the family back. Circuit Ventures has sued NXP Semiconductors (6:19-cv-00275) and Pepprl + Fuchs (4:19-cv-01515) in April 2019 and Honeywell (1:19-cv-00857), Link Interactive (1:19-cv-00856), and Scout Security (1:19-cv-00858) so far in May. Likewise, Universal Cipher LLC assigned a single patent generally related to “dynamic” text generation to Cumberland Systems, LLC, which asserted it in litigation from May 2017 to May 2018 before returning the patent to Universal Cipher, which has now sued Best Buy (2:19-cv-00160), Target (2:19-cv-00163), and Wal-Mart (2:19-cv-00164) over it. These reversals, as well as other assignment activity, suggest a return to Delaware for these and other NPEs affiliated with the same patent attorney, perhaps motivated by a recent Federal Circuit opinion clarifying that targets of letter-writing campaigns can seek declaratory judgments in their home districts, rather than risk being sued elsewhere.

Lucio Development LLC has filed a second wave in the litigation campaign over a single embedded software patent, begun with a first wave in December 2017. The new defendants, like the earlier ones, have been sued across Texas: Cadence Design Systems (6:19-cv-00033), Qorvo (6:19-cv-00034), and Semtech (6:19-cv-00035) in the Eastern District; Maxim (3:19-cv-00255), Microchip Technology (3:19-cv-00256), and TI (3:19-cv-00257) in the Northern District; and Mellanox Technologies (1:19-cv-00076) and Silicon Laboratories (1:19-cv-00077) in the Western District. The NPE plaintiff has targeted the defendants’ software development kits throughout the campaign.

In early October, RPX noted the assignment of a single patent, generally related to a method for producing embedded software for use in a communications system, from a Delaware entity, Embedded Software LLC, to a Texas entity Lucio Development LLC. That Texas entity has now launched a campaign, asserting the patent received in separate lawsuits filed across the state, one in the Eastern District, against Xilinx (6:17-cv-00688); one in the Southern District, against Marvell (4:17-cv-04747); one in the Northern District, against STMicro (3:17-cv-03356); and the rest in the Western District, against AMD (1:17-cv-01148), Cirrus Logic (1:17-cv-01149), Cypress Semiconductor (1:17-cv-01150), Infineon Technologies (1:17-cv-01152), MediaTek (1:17-cv-01153), NVIDIA (1:17-cv-01154), and NXP Semiconductors (1:17-cv-01155). The accused products are the defendants’ software development kits (e.g., AMD’s Accelerated Parallel Processing, Infineon’s DAVE, MediaTek’s LinkIt, etc.).