QLogic Corporation

Company overview. QLogic Corporation was an American manufacturer of server and storage networking connectivity products, founded in 1992 as a spinoff of Emulex and headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California. It was publicly traded on NASDAQ under QLGC from 1994 until August 2016, when Cavium, Inc. acquired it for roughly $1.36 billion (Wikipedia; Mergr; CRN). Cavium was itself acquired by Marvell Technology Group in 2018, so QLogic's former operations and brand now sit inside Marvell. At the time of the Cavium deal QLogic had roughly 780–930 employees and reported revenue of about $520M (FY2015) and $459M (FY2016) (Mergr; SEC deal materials).

Products / operations. QLogic designed and sold high-performance storage- and server-networking hardware, including Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), Fibre Channel switches, converged network adapters for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI adapters, Ethernet network interface controllers (e.g., the FastLinQ line), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), plus SAN management software. Customers were mainly server and storage OEMs, enterprise data centers, and cloud/service providers (Investing.com; Wikipedia).

Patent-litigation posture. In the tracked database QLogic appears only once, as a defendant (1 defendant case; 0 as plaintiff), in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The plaintiff, Vixel Corporation, was an operating company — a Bothell, Washington-based maker of Fibre Channel switches and hubs — not a non-practicing entity. QLogic's posture here is therefore an operating company defending against a competitor's infringement allegations in a conventional commercial dispute, not a PAE campaign. The venue (Delaware) is notable as a corporate-law forum rather than the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas.

Notable case and context. The tracked suit, Vixel Corp. v. QLogic Corp., was filed in February 2003 and alleged that QLogic's storage-area-network switching products infringed a Vixel patent covering data transmission in Fibre Channel networks — the technology area at the core of both companies' businesses (SFGate; Network Computing). Emulex acquired Vixel in late 2003, and QLogic countersued Emulex in December 2003. The parties settled in June 2004 with a cross-license under which QLogic acknowledged the validity of three Vixel/Emulex patents and agreed to pay royalties on future sales of certain products (CNET). QLogic no longer exists as an independent litigant, having been absorbed by Cavium and later Marvell.