Microsemi SOC Corporation

Company overview. Microsemi SOC Corporation (also styled "Microsemi SoC Corp.") is a California-incorporated semiconductor subsidiary. It was originally Actel Corporation, renamed Microsemi SoC Corp. in 2012 after Actel's acquisition by Microsemi Corporation (formerly Nasdaq: MSCC, Aliso Viejo, CA). Microsemi Corporation itself was acquired by Microchip Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MCHP) in May 2018 for an enterprise value of about $10.15 billion, and Microsemi SoC Corp. remains a significant, wholly owned Microchip subsidiary. No standalone revenue or headcount is published for the subsidiary; its parent Microsemi employed roughly 4,400–4,800 people before the deal.

Products / operations. Microsemi SOC is an operating company — the former "Microsemi SoC Products Group," headquartered in San Jose, CA. It designs and sells flash-based field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and system-on-chip (SoC) FPGAs, including the IGLOO/IGLOO2, SmartFusion/SmartFusion2 (with ARM Cortex-M3 cores), PolarFire, and radiation-tolerant RTG4 and RT ProASIC3 families, plus the Libero SoC design software suite. Its devices target aerospace, defense, space, communications, and industrial high-reliability applications.

Patent-litigation posture. Microsemi SOC is a defendant-only litigant in our tracked database: 1 case as defendant, 0 as plaintiff. It is an operating company defending against a patent-assertion suit filed in the Eastern District of Texas (Marshall Division), a venue known for plaintiff-friendly patent litigation.

Notable case. The sole tracked case is Sentient Sensors, LLC v. Microsemi Corporation et al. (2:18-cv-00121, filed March 30, 2018), which named Microsemi, Microsemi SOC, and distributor Arrow Electronics. Plaintiff Sentient Sensors — an inventor-controlled entity — asserted U.S. Patent No. 6,938,177, covering a reconfigurable field-programmable controller similar to a system-on-a-chip, targeting Microsemi's SoC/FPGA products. The case closed in April 2019 (reportedly via settlement); Sentient Sensors later asserted the same patent against Cypress Semiconductor and Xilinx. No judgment on the merits was recorded.