LSI Corp.

LSI Corporation — commonly "LSI," and known as LSI Logic Corporation until its 2007 merger with Agere Systems — was an American semiconductor and storage/networking software company. It was founded in 1981 by Wilfred Corrigan (some accounts cite former Fairchild Semiconductor executives) and headquartered in Milpitas, California, with various operations moved to San Jose. It was publicly traded on Nasdaq (ticker LSI). Per archived corporate data, it reported roughly $2.37 billion in 2013 revenue (~$2.5 billion in 2012) and about 5,300 employees as of December 31, 2013. Avago Technologies agreed in December 2013 to acquire LSI for $6.6 billion; the deal closed May 6, 2014, making LSI an indirect wholly owned Avago subsidiary. Through Avago's later acquisitions and rename, LSI's businesses now sit inside Broadcom Inc.

Products / operations: LSI designed semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in data centers, mobile networks, and client computing. Its major lines included SAS/SATA/SCSI RAID controllers and host bus adapters (the MegaRAID and 3ware lines), RAID-on-chip controllers, flash-memory controllers (via its 2012 SandForce acquisition), Nytro PCIe flash accelerator cards, read-channel and storage SoCs for hard disk and solid-state drives, and network processors, plus networking products inherited from Agere. It sold its Engenio external storage systems business to NetApp in 2011. This is clearly an operating company, not a shell licensor.

Litigation posture: Across tracked cases, LSI appears once, solely as a defendant and zero times as plaintiff — consistent with an operating company being sued rather than a patent assertion entity. The single tracked matter is SanDisk Corp. v. LSI Corp., filed June 19, 2009, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California before Judge William Alsup, a venue not associated with plaintiff-friendly patent forums.

Context: The 2009 SanDisk suit predates LSI's 2012 SandForce acquisition and its 2014 acquisition by Avago; both parties were then active storage/flash semiconductor competitors. No further tracked appearances are recorded for LSI after the Avago acquisition.