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Litigation of Bandspeed Patents Passes the Decade Mark
New Patent Litigation
Bandspeed, LLC has kept alive its litigation over a long-asserted portfolio of patents, suing Cypress Semiconductor (1:19-cv-00936) in a new case filed on the heels of notices of settlement in the last two open suits in the campaign, one against each of Curtis International and NXP Semiconductors. The portfolio generally relates to managing communication channels through frequency hopping and transmission power control, with Bandspeed identifying representative Cypress products (the CYW20819 Bluetooth (BT) microcontroller and the PSoC MCU, respectively) that allegedly infringe through the practice of certain Bluetooth standards. Litigation over this portfolio reaches back over a decade, when the prior owner Bandspeed, Inc. (BSI), the operating assets of which were later purchased by Broadcom, launched a campaign that had hit over three dozen defendants by its late 2017 end.
September 28, 2019
Bandspeed Targets Chip Companies in New Phase of Campaign
New Patent Litigation, NPE
Bandspeed has moved upstream, targeting semiconductor vendors Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek, Qualcomm, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments in six new filings. (Last spring, plaintiff Bandspeed, at one time a developer of radio frequency communication products, issued a press release announcing a commercial partnership with defendant Broadcom, its only such announcement since 2011.) Defendants' integrated circuit products that use adaptive frequency hopping for Bluetooth are accused of infringing five patents (7,027,418, 7,477,624, 7,570,614, 7,903,608, 8,542,643). In two earlier cases filed in 2009 and 2010, Bandspeed sued 20 makers of downstream consumer electronics products with Bluetooth functionality (including Apple, Belkin, Blackberry, Casio, Dell, Garmin, HTC, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nintendo, Pantech, Plantronics, Samsung, Sony, TomTom and Toshiba). Accused products included mobile handsets, personal computers, gaming and navigation devices, and headsets. LG, the last remaining defendant in the 2009-2010 filings, was dismissed with prejudice on May 1, 2014. 5/9, Western District of Texas, 1:14-cv-00433, 1:14-cv-00434, 1:14-cv-00435, 1:14-cv-00436, 1:14-cv-00437, 1:14-cv-00438.
May 15, 2014