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.

Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) and its subsidiary Wireless Future Technologies, Inc. have filed suit against Toyota (2:25-cv-00066) in the Eastern District of Texas, alleging infringement of seven wireless communications patents through the provision of vehicles that support LTE communications. The plaintiffs plead willfulness, alleging that WiLAN sent a letter to Toyota as early as August 2021 (over three of the patents), after which Toyota referred WiLAN to its “major TCU suppliers” LG and Continental; per the new complaint, LG apparently took a license, but Continental did not.

Juries returned a series of sizable damages awards in patent infringement suits this past year. However, subsequent developments in some of the cases with 2024’s largest verdicts underscore how a jury verdict is frequently not the final word on damages—with the year’s top verdict, an $847M award in East Texas, falling apart entirely due to a post-trial ruling; four others increased at final judgment with the addition of interest, in one case this past week; and another trimmed by a posttrial noninfringement ruling. Here, RPX takes a look back at these and the other top ten verdicts of 2024.

Xueshan Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN), received a large portfolio of patents from MediaTek back in December 2020. The recipient litigated some of them, against Renesas Electronics, from May 2022 into early 2024. Now, another entity has picked up a portfolio from the same source, the transacted assets concerning chip configuration and memory devices and including patents that MediaTek asserted in its own litigation, running from February 2019 through August 2022.

Earlier this year, Polaris Innovations Limited resolved separate cases that it had earlier filed against Nanya Technology and Xilinx (acquired by AMD in 2022). Now, the campaign has come back to life, with the filing of a Western District of Texas complaint against Qualcomm (7:24-cv-00296). The Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) plaintiff asserts four memory technology patents, targeting the provision of various processors, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4, 6, 7, 8, and X Series, that include various types of LPDDR memory (LPDDR4/4X/5/5X) and/or that utilize certain semiconductor packaging technology.

Lenovo (United States) Inc. (1:24-cv-01126), a US subsidiary of Lenovo, has filed suit against Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc. (UCT) in the District of Delaware. The Lenovo sub seeks declaratory judgments (DJs) of noninfringement of the eight patents that UCT asserted against Lenovo (the Hong Kong parent) in a Eastern District of Texas complaint filed in late 2023. UCT also sued Dell and HP last year. Threshold issues have dominated each case: against Dell, the production of documents created by Stout Capital in connection with a valuation of the sale of Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN)’s monetization business; against HP, a convenience transfer to the Northern District of California (which occurred this past summer); and against Lenovo, the exercise of personal jurisdiction over the parent entity.

Since August 2014, Collabo Innovations, Inc., a Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) subsidiary, has been litigating a portfolio of patents received in 2013 from Panasonic, doing so across three campaigns as a formal matter. In February of this year, the last active case, against AMD in the Western District of Texas, was dismissed with prejudice after the parties noticed a resolution. Now, Collabo has sued Qualcomm (6:24-cv-00472) over the same single patent, generally related to a conserving power in a microcontroller. The accused products include “Qualcomm processors such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Processor APQ8064 and other processors and platforms offered and sold by Qualcomm that support low power state with power collapse (and similar functionality)”.

Patent assignments recently made public by the USPTO reveal several notable moves, including the transfer of 175 US assets, generally related to semiconductor fabrication and circuit structures, into curious hands; the transfer of a handful of patents from an individual inventor working in the AI space to a “Patent Licensing and Enforcement” vehicle formed earlier this month; and the transfer of an entire portfolio of connected vehicle patents, after an asset acquisition in the volatile EV space earlier in 2024.

Earlier this year, Northern District of California Judge Jon S. Tigar rejected an unusual argument from plaintiff Lauri Valjakka urging the court to apply Finnish common law concerning the appropriation of abandoned shipwrecks and piles of discarded leather scraps to save his case. Then, Eastern District of Texas Judge Rodney Gilstrap held that French law, which follows “the privity rule”, applies to the contract giving rise to a FRAND obligation; and that Samsung provided insufficient evidence under French law that plaintiff G+ Communications LLC could be considered the alter ego of ZTE. For the latest brush with foreign law in domestic patent cases it is back to Judge Gilstrap, who just denied a motion to dismiss on a license defense that brushed up against a ruling under German law.

Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc. (UCT) has followed up its late September 2023 cases filed separately against HP in the Western District of Texas and Lenovo in the Eastern District of Texas with a new suit against Dell (1:23-cv-01506), in the former venue. Received in a portfolio from Lattice Semiconductor in November 2021, the same eight patents are asserted against Dell, with infringement allegations targeting the provision of a wide array of devices, including laptops, desktops, monitors, docking stations, and adapters, that support various versions and features of the DisplayPort and USB standards.