Spansion Inc.

Company overview
Spansion, Inc. (NYSE: CODE; earlier NASDAQ: SPSN) was a Sunnyvale, California-based flash-memory and embedded-systems semiconductor company. Its roots trace to the 1993 flash-memory joint venture of AMD and Fujitsu; it was spun off as an independent Delaware corporation in 2003 and IPO'd in December 2005. It filed Chapter 11 in 2009 and emerged in 2010. It ceased to exist as an independent public company on March 12, 2015, when its all-stock merger with Cypress Semiconductor (announced at roughly $4–5 billion) closed; Spansion survived as a wholly owned Cypress subsidiary. Cypress was itself acquired by Infineon Technologies in 2020. Public reports put Spansion's 2014 revenue at about $1.25 billion, down from roughly $2.5 billion in 2007, with several thousand employees.

Products / operations
Spansion designed and manufactured non-volatile memory and embedded-processing products: parallel and serial NOR flash (its MirrorBit charge-trapping technology), lower-density NAND and embedded managed NAND, microcontrollers (expanded by its 2013 acquisition of Fujitsu's MCU business), and analog/mixed-signal and embedded SoC offerings, sold mainly into automotive, industrial, communications and consumer markets. It operated Fab 25 in Austin, Texas and assembly/test operations in Bangkok, Thailand.

Patent-litigation posture
An operating company and active two-way litigant — not an NPE. Both its plaintiff cases (three PTAB filings) and its two defendant cases stem from a mutual patent conflict with rival NOR-flash maker Macronix International of Taiwan. Spansion asserted first, filing an ITC Section 337 complaint in August 2013 (Inv. No. 337-TA-893) plus a parallel district-court suit, while Macronix countersued at the ITC (337-TA-922) and in Germany; the parties also filed inter partes review petitions against each other. Venues were the ITC, PTAB, Northern District of California and Germany — not the Eastern District of Texas.

Notable cases / context
The headline matters are Spansion LLC v. Macronix (337-TA-893, six flash-memory patents) and Macronix v. Spansion (337-TA-922). On January 27, 2015 the companies settled all worldwide disputes, dismissing the ITC, district-court, IPR and German actions and cross-licensing the disputed patents. Spansion had earlier asserted four of the same patents against Samsung, Apple, Nokia and others in Inv. No. 337-TA-735.