Level One Communications, Inc. (also written "Incorporated"; NASDAQ ticker LEVL pre-merger) was a fabless communications-semiconductor company founded in November 1985, originally in Folsom, California, and later headquartered at 9750 Goethe Road, Sacramento, California. It held an IPO in August 1993. In August 1999 Intel Corporation completed a stock-for-stock merger valuing Level One at roughly $2.2 billion, after which Level One operated as a wholly owned Intel subsidiary reporting into Intel's Network Communications Group, with CEO Robert Pepper becoming a group vice president. Reuters reported 1998 revenue of about $263 million; current employee counts are not verifiable because the entity no longer reports separately.
Products / operations. Level One designed mixed-signal "silicon connectivity" ICs for telecom and data networking — chiefly physical-layer (Layer 1) devices: long- and short-haul T1/E1 transceivers, ISDN interface circuitry, switched-56/DDS transceivers, CSU/DSUs, HDSL and multirate DSL transceivers and repeaters, plus Ethernet PHYs, LAN-switching silicon and the NetCelerator 10/100/1000 Ethernet network-accelerator chips. It was fabless, relying on foundry partners. It acquired Austin-based Jato Technologies (announced November 1998, ~$80 million in stock) for high-speed data-over-copper products.
Patent-litigation posture. An operating company, not a PAE. The tracked data shows one case, zero as plaintiff and one as defendant — consistent with a supplier pulled into litigation rather than an assertion campaign. The venue is the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, not a plaintiff-friendly district such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case. Storage Technology Corporation v. Cisco Systems, Inc. et al.: StorageTek sued Cisco in 1999 in the Western District of Wisconsin over U.S. Patents 5,842,040 and 5,566,170 (packet caching and forwarding); the case transferred to N.D. Cal. (C00-1176 SI), where Level One — then an Intel subsidiary — appeared as a third-party defendant alongside distributors such as Avnet, Plexus and Wyle Electronics. Cisco won summary judgment of noninfringement in 2002; the Federal Circuit (329 F.3d 823 (2003)) affirmed as to the '170 patent and vacated as to the '040 patent, and Cisco ultimately prevailed at a 2005 jury trial. Later Intel restructuring sold the former Level One optical-networking components assets to Cortina Systems in 2006.