SiOnyx, LLC

SiOnyx, LLC (branded SIONYX) is a privately held, silicon-photonics and imaging company headquartered at 100 Cummings Center, Beverly, Massachusetts. It was founded in 2005–2006 by Harvard professor Eric Mazur and his then-graduate student James Carey to commercialize "black silicon," a laser-textured silicon process that extends CMOS image-sensor sensitivity into the near/short-wave infrared. Press and funding databases report total venture funding of roughly $32 million from investors including In-Q-Tel, Polaris Partners and 180 Degree Capital; DC Capital Partners acquired the company in August 2021, and it acquired imaging-software firm American Imaging Engineering (Amigen) in 2023. Employee count is reported in the 51–200 band by third-party profiles; no verified revenue figure is available. Some aggregator pages list SiOnyx as a "subsidiary," but the parent is not consistently identified in reliable sources.

Products / operations. SiOnyx develops and manufactures ultra-low-light CMOS image sensors marketed as the XQE family (including the XQE-1350 black-silicon sensor) and night-vision camera systems. Its consumer line is the Aurora day/night action-camera family (Aurora, Aurora Sport, Aurora Pro) and Nightwave marine camera; its defense/tactical line includes the OPSIN DNVM1 helmet-mounted digital night-vision monocular, which the company announced in 2022. It also supplies sensors and camera modules to OEMs and government customers; it received a ~$20 million U.S. Army award tied to the IVAS program. This is a real operating business, not a shell or licensing vehicle.

Litigation posture. The tracked record shows SiOnyx as an operating company that litigated offensively, not a patent assertion entity: 3 cases as plaintiff and 1 as defendant. The single defendant-side matter is Hamamatsu's 2016 PTAB petition; the plaintiff-side cases are a 2015 District of Massachusetts suit (Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV) and two Federal Circuit appeals, not a pattern of mass NPE filings.

Notable case. SiOnyx, LLC v. Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. (D. Mass. 1:15-cv-13488) arose from a 2007 NDA between the parties over black-silicon photodetectors. A 2019 jury found Hamamatsu breached the NDA and willfully infringed U.S. Patent 8,080,467 (owned by Harvard, exclusively licensed to SiOnyx); post-trial and Federal Circuit rulings (Dec. 2020) awarded SiOnyx ownership of Hamamatsu's disputed U.S. and foreign patents and affirmed injunctions. The Federal Circuit declined to reach willfulness.