Sony Semiconductor Corporation was the semiconductor manufacturing arm of the Sony Group, headquartered in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan (Kikuyo-machi, Kikuchi-gun). It traces to the 2001 integration of Sony's Kyushu fabrication sites into Sony Semiconductor Kyushu Corporation, renamed Sony Semiconductor Corporation in 2010. In April 2016 it was renamed Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation (est. November 9, 2015; operations from April 1, 2016), itself wholly owned by Sony Group Corporation (TSE: 6758; NYSE: SONY). The manufacturing entity reports roughly 13,000 employees (April 2026); Sony's Imaging & Sensing Solutions segment, which houses the semiconductor business, recorded FY2025 sales of ¥2,151.5 billion (~$13.8 billion).
Operations: the company designs, develops, manufactures, and services semiconductor products, chiefly CMOS image sensors — the core of Sony's business and its global number-one position in that market. Product lines include image sensors for smartphones, digital cameras, automotive cameras, and industrial/social-infrastructure applications, plus depth/LiDAR (SPAD) sensors, SWIR industrial sensors, and semiconductor lasers; software offerings include the AITRIOS edge-AI sensing platform. It also operates under a fab network spanning Kumamoto (Koshi/Kikuyo), Nagasaki, Oita, and Kagoshima, and is a partner in a planned image-sensor joint venture with TSMC.
Litigation posture: the tracked data shows one case, with Sony Semiconductor named only as a defendant and never as plaintiff — the profile of an operating company being attacked, not an assertion entity. The single suit, Raytheon Company v. Sony Kabushiki Kaisha et al., was filed March 6, 2015 in the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division (Judge Rodney Gilstrap), against multiple Sony entities plus Apple and OmniVision.
Notable case context: Raytheon asserted U.S. Patent 5,591,678, covering methods of fabricating stacked three-dimensional microelectronic devices — technology relevant to image-sensor fabrication. Sony (alongside Samsung) petitioned for inter partes review; the PTAB held the claims unpatentable as obvious, and the Federal Circuit affirmed in 2018 (Raytheon Co. v. Sony Corp., No. 17-1554, nonprecedential).