BiTMICRO, LLC has sued Western Digital (8:24-cv-01903) in the Central District of California, targeting the provision of solid state drives (SSDs) with certain encryption features, those using the NVMe protocol, and those with SLC caching functionality, as well as NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric) storage platforms. Four patents, familiar to this campaign, are asserted; the plaintiff describes them as relating to “groundbreaking improvements to memory controllers, mapping tables for memory devices, NVMe over Fabrics technologies, and data security”. BiTMICRO has yet to file its certification of interested parties in connection with the new case, but it has previously identified its members, in connection with a case transferred to the Northern District of California.

BiTMICRO, LLC has filed a second case against KIOXIA (6:23-cv-00461), this time targeting the provision of solid state drives (SSDs) that either support encryption capabilities or are used in Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) systems, including those of Ingrasys Technologies. Two patents are asserted in the new Western District of Texas complaint, a copy of which appears to have been filed in the March 2022 case against KIOXIA, which concerns three different patents and has already made its way through claim construction before District Judge Alan D. Albright. Meanwhile, Judge Albright has transferred a suit that BiTMICRO filed against Intel on the same day as its first complaint against KIOXIA to the Northern District of California, where BiTMICRO has now disclosed its members and from which Intel now seeks a stay pending resolution of a set of related inter partes reviews (IPRs).

BiTMICRO, LLC has sued Intel (6:22-cv-00335) and KIOXIA (6:22-cv-00331) over the provision of a wide variety of memory products, including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), RAID controllers, solid-state drives (SSDs), and more. The Western District of Texas cases mark a return to litigation for BiTMICRO, which filed a 2017 complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) that prompted an investigation that persisted into mid-2019. BiTMICRO alleges that the defendants’ current infringement of a subset of the patents-in-suit has been willful by virtue of September 2018 subpoenas served in connection with that ITC action.