Company overview. SMART Worldwide Holdings, Inc. (formerly SMART Modular Technologies (WWH), Inc., and part of the "SMART" / "SMART Modular" family of companies) is a Cayman Islands holding company with U.S. offices at 39870 Eureka Drive, Newark, California. The underlying SMART Modular business was founded in 1988 and traded publicly (NASDAQ: SMOD) before being taken private on August 26, 2011 by investment funds affiliated with Silver Lake Partners and Silver Lake Sumeru, in a deal valued around $645 million ($9.25/share). It is now an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of SMART Global Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq-listed since its 2017 IPO and since renamed Penguin Solutions). Third-party data aggregators estimate SMART Modular at roughly 1,000–4,300 employees and $100M–$900M annual revenue; these are estimates, not audited figures.
Products / services. It designs, manufactures and supplies specialty memory and embedded storage for OEMs: DRAM memory modules, flash memory cards, and solid-state drives (embedded, removable and ruggedized), plus custom supply-chain services (procurement, logistics, inventory management, warehousing, kitting and packaging). End markets include computing, networking, communications, storage, defense/aerospace, industrial, gaming and printing. Manufacturing, packaging/test and R&D sites span the U.S., Brazil, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Scotland.
Patent-litigation posture. This is an operating company, not an NPE: in the tracked data it appears as defendant in 2 of 2 cases and as plaintiff in 0. Both tracked suits are Netlist, Inc. infringement actions. They are flanked by SMART-side counter-actions (declaratory-judgment complaints and IPR petitions against Netlist's memory-module patents), but those are not reflected as separate plaintiff cases in this dataset. Neither tracked venue is the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable cases / context. Netlist, Inc. v. SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. et al. (C.D. Cal., 2013) and Netlist, Inc. v. SMART Storage Systems, Inc. et al. (N.D. Cal.) arose from Netlist's 2013 complaints over the ULLtraDIMM module and the '295 patent (with antitrust/trade-secret claims against SMART Modular, SMART Storage Systems, SMART Worldwide and Diablo Technologies); claims were transferred and largely dismissed or stipulated out in 2014. SMART Storage Systems, then a SMART Worldwide subsidiary, was sold to SanDisk for ~$307 million in August 2013.