Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Inphi Corporation (NASDAQ: IPHI) was an American fabless semiconductor company incorporated in Delaware in November 2000 as TCom Communications, Inc. and renamed Inphi Corporation in February 2001. It was headquartered in San Jose, California, having earlier been based in Westlake Village and Santa Clara, California. In 2020 it reported revenue of $683 million and roughly 1,086 employees. Inphi ceased to be independent on April 20, 2021, when Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL) completed its acquisition of the company in a deal valued at approximately $10 billion; Inphi now operates as a Marvell subsidiary.
Products / operations. Inphi supplied high-speed analog and mixed-signal semiconductors and optical subsystems for cloud data centers, telecom and networking OEMs. Its product lines included linear transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs), modulator drivers, optical physical-layer devices, coherent and PAM4 DSPs, silicon-photonics-based subsystems (e.g., COLORZ), and high-speed SerDes IP, spanning roughly 10G to 800G data rates. It also sold memory-interface components, including isolation memory buffers (iMB) for LRDIMM modules; that memory business was sold to Rambus in 2016. Inphi's other businesses went to Marvell. It was an operating company, not a non-practicing entity.
Patent-litigation posture. The structured data show a single tracked case, in which Inphi is the defendant and never the plaintiff — the profile of an operating company being sued rather than an active two-way litigant. The case sits in the Central District of California, not a plaintiff-friendly venue such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case / context. In Netlist, Inc. v. Inphi Corporation (C.D. Cal., Case No. CV 09-06900 DSF, filed September 22, 2009), Netlist — a memory-module maker that has been a prolific patent plaintiff — alleged that Inphi's iMB isolation memory buffer ICs infringed U.S. Patent Nos. 7,532,537, 7,636,274 and 7,619,912, seeking damages and an injunction. Inphi moved to stay the case pending reexaminations and an interference proceeding. Netlist also announced that a separate Inphi suit against it, filed November 30, 2009, was dismissed without prejudice in April 2011.
Filed together with the Google case, Netlist asserted the '912 patent against Inphi. The case was stayed in 2010 pending the merged reexamination; no formal disposition was confirmed.