Finisar Corporation

Finisar Corporation — commonly "Finisar" — was an optical communications components manufacturer headquartered at 1389 Moffett Park Drive, Sunnyvale, California. It was incorporated in California in April 1987 (company materials and press releases commonly cite a 1988 founding date) and reincorporated in Delaware in 1999, the year of its NASDAQ IPO under the ticker FNSR. In September 2019, II‑VI Incorporated completed its acquisition of Finisar for approximately $3.2 billion; Finisar ceased to trade as a separate public company and is now part of Coherent Corp., the name II‑VI adopted after its 2022 merger with Coherent, Inc. At the time of the deal, Finisar reported roughly $1.3 billion in annual revenue (FY2018, ended April 29, 2018) and about 12,000–14,000 employees worldwide.

Finisar designed and manufactured fiber-optic subsystems and components. Its product lines included optical transceivers and transponders (notably 100G QSFP28 and 400G modules), optical engines, active optical cables, wavelength selective switches (WSS) and ROADM/wavelength-management products, optical amplifiers, optical instrumentation, RF-over-fiber products, and VCSEL arrays for 3D sensing. The company was vertically integrated, designing its own analog/digital ICs and lasers/photodetectors in-house, and sold primarily to networking and telecom equipment OEMs (Cisco, Ciena, Huawei, Nokia, Juniper, Fujitsu, ZTE and others), data center operators, and consumer/automotive customers.

Litigation posture: the case data shows Finisar with 0 plaintiff cases and 1 defendant case — the profile of an operating company defending against an assertion entity rather than an NPE. Its sole tracked appearance is Fiber, LLC v. Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc. (later Nokia of America Corp.) et al., in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Denver. Finisar was not an original defendant; it joined two consolidated actions as a defendant-intervenor, alongside Ciena and Viavi/Lumentum defendants. Plaintiff Fiber, LLC is a Wyoming limited liability company asserting itself as exclusive assignee of two patents (U.S. 6,430,332 and 7,095,917) directed to optical beam-directing/switching technology.

Context: the consolidated Colorado cases were resolved when, after a September 6, 2017 claim-construction order, the parties stipulated to a final judgment of invalidity and non-infringement; the court dismissed the complaints on September 13, 2018, and the Federal Circuit affirmed on November 21, 2019. Notably, the suits were venued in Colorado rather than plaintiff-friendly districts such as the Eastern District of Texas.