Agere Systems LLC

Agere Systems LLC (formerly Agere Systems Inc.) was a semiconductor company headquartered in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was incorporated on August 1, 2000 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Lucent Technologies — built from Lucent's microelectronics group — and spun off to Lucent shareholders on June 1, 2002. At formation it reported roughly $4.7 billion in annual revenue and about 16,500–17,000 employees across 22 countries; by its later years it was a much smaller, fab-lite company (PitchBook lists ~5,100 employees). Agere ceased to exist as an independent public company when it merged into LSI Corporation on April 2, 2007, in an approximately $4 billion stock deal. Through that chain of acquisitions, the Agere entity now sits within Broadcom Inc. (LSI → Avago Technologies in 2014 → Avago/Broadcom combination in 2016).

Products/operations: Agere designed and manufactured communications semiconductors — integrated circuits and optoelectronic components. Its two reported segments were Consumer Enterprise (read channels, preamplifiers, motor/disk controllers and SoCs for hard disk drives; ICs for mobile phones, Ethernet, storage area networks, printing/imaging, satellite radio) and Telecommunications (SONET/SDH, broadband aggregation, network processing, traffic management and DSP devices). It held a substantial patent portfolio (over 3,500 patent documents per PitchBook) in wireless, storage and networking technology.

Litigation posture: In the authoritative case list, Agere appears once — as a defendant, not a plaintiff — in a 2012 case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose. This reflects an operating/patent-holding company and licensor being pulled into a declaratory-judgment action after it (through parent LSI) asserted standard-essential patents, rather than a shell NPE filing a portfolio campaign. The single defendant appearance is a function of the plaintiff filing first, not evidence of passive defense.

Notable case: Realtek Semiconductor Corp. v. LSI Corporation et al., No. 5:12-cv-03451 (N.D. Cal. 2012). Realtek sought a declaration over Agere's IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standard-essential patents (U.S. 6,452,958 and 6,707,867) and RAND/FRAND commitments; the court found LSI/Agere breached RAND obligations by filing an ITC Section 337 action before offering a license, and a 2014 jury set the first FRAND rates by jury verdict (0.12% and 0.07%).