Microsemi Corporation

Company overview. Microsemi Corporation (formerly Microsemiconductor Corp., renamed in 1983) was founded in 1960 and, at the time of its final years as an independent company, was headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California. It was publicly traded on Nasdaq under the ticker MSCC until Microchip Technology Incorporated (Nasdaq: MCHP) completed its roughly $10.3 billion acquisition of the company on May 29, 2018, taking it private as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microchip. At acquisition, Microsemi reported approximately 4,800 employees globally.

Products / operations. Microsemi designs, manufactures, and markets high-reliability analog and mixed-signal semiconductors and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center, and industrial customers. Product lines included high-performance and radiation-hardened analog mixed-signal ICs, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), system-on-chip (SoC) and ASIC solutions, power-management and power-over-Ethernet products, timing and synchronization devices, high-reliability discrete components, and storage subsystems. It is a genuine operating company, not a patent-assertion entity.

Patent-litigation posture. Microsemi is an operating company that appears as a defendant: the case data shows 0 plaintiff appearances and 1 defendant appearance. The single tracked suit — Sentient Sensors, LLC v. Microsemi Corporation et al., filed March 30, 2018 — was brought in the Marshall Division of the Eastern District of Texas, a venue historically favored by patent plaintiffs, and was filed by an inventor-controlled non-practicing entity asserting U.S. Patent No. 6,938,177 ("Multi-Chip Module Smart Controller"), which relates to FPGA-based instrument controllers.

Notable context. The suit named Microsemi, Microsemi SOC, and Arrow as defendants and closed in April 2019 (per RPX, after roughly a year, ending in settlement). Sentient Sensors subsequently asserted the same patent against Cypress Semiconductor and Xilinx/AMD. Notably, the case was filed just two months before Microchip's acquisition of Microsemi closed, so the litigation was defended during the company's transition to a Microchip subsidiary.