A recently recorded assignment from QinetiQ, a multinational defense and security company, to a Delaware NPE, suggests that a new litigation campaign is likely imminent. The assignee now holding QinetiQ patents appears to be associated with two NPEs that collectively hit over 30 defendants in 2018-2019.

DIFF Scale Operation Research, LLC launched a litigation campaign on March 13 by asserting different subsets of 13 patents originally developed by ADC Telecommunications in separate lawsuits filed against Cypress Semiconductor and IDT in the District of Delaware and Calix, Cisco, Huawei, Intel (Altera), and Microsemi in the Eastern District of Texas. Roughly one week later, the NPE brought six more cases, this time against Broadcom (2:18-cv-00079), NXP (2:18-cv-00076), and ON Semiconductor (2:18-cv-00077) in the Eastern District of Texas, against Cavium (3:18-cv-00612) and Maxim (3:18-cv-00611) in the Northern District of Texas, and against Extreme Networks (1:18-cv-02324) in the Southern District of New York. DIFF Scale targets, across all 13 defendants, products ranging from multiservice networking platforms to certain FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).

The USPTO recently made public Panasonic’s February assignment of a digital rights management portfolio to an NPE controlled by Brian Yates. Also among the assignments recorded in mid-March are transfers from Harris Corporation to an IP Valuation Partners LLC affiliate, and from CommScope to DIFF Scale Operation Research, LLC; both NPEs have initiated campaigns this month asserting some of the transacted assets.

DIFF Scale Operation Research, LLC recorded the November 2017 assignment of over 20 patents acquired from CommScope on the same day that it asserted different subsets of those patents against seven defendants in a new litigation campaign. On March 8, the NPE filed two separate complaints in the District of Delaware against Cypress Semiconductor (1:18-cv-00372) and IDT (1:18-cv-00373) and five separate complaints in the Eastern District of Texas against Calix (2:18-cv-00063), Cisco (2:18-cv-00063), Huawei (2:18-cv-00063), Intel (Altera) (2:18-cv-00063), and Microsemi (2:18-cv-00063). Most of the patents generally relate to virtual networking, while some broadly concern using phase-locked loops (PLLs) to generate clock signals. Across the defendants, accused products range from multiservice networking platforms to certain FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).