Acacia Communications, Inc.

Overview. Acacia Communications, Inc. is a Delaware-incorporated optical networking company founded in 2009 and headquartered at 3 Mill and Main Place, Maynard, Massachusetts. It held a NASDAQ IPO in 2016 (ticker ACIA) and was acquired by Cisco Systems on March 1, 2021 for approximately $4.5 billion ($115.00 per share in cash), after which it was delisted and became a wholly-owned Cisco subsidiary; Acacia employees joined Cisco's Optics business within its Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group. Reported headcount was roughly 460, with revenue of about $465 million in 2019 and about $583 million in 2020 (per Acacia 10-K and third-party profiles).

Products / operations. Acacia designs and sells high-speed coherent optical interconnect hardware. Its three product groups are: low-power coherent digital signal processor ASICs (DSP ASICs); silicon photonic integrated circuits (silicon PICs); and optical interconnect modules — embedded and pluggable — supporting transmission speeds from 100 Gbps to 400 Gbps and above (with development work on 400ZR and terabit-class modules). Target applications include long-haul, metro, inter-data-center and submarine links. It is an operating company, not an NPE.

Patent-litigation posture. Acacia is an operating company appearing primarily as a defendant. In the tracked data it is a defendant in two cases and a plaintiff in one, both involving the same adversary. It is not a patent assertion entity and has no plaintiff-side assertion campaign.

Notable cases. Ramot at Tel Aviv University Ltd. v. Acacia Communications, Inc. (D. Del., filed Feb. 26, 2021) accused Acacia of infringing two patents; the court stayed the case pending ex parte reexaminations. Cisco Systems, Inc. et al. v. Ramot at Tel Aviv University Ltd. (D. Del., filed Sept. 28, 2021) was a declaratory-judgment action by Cisco and Acacia of non-infringement of the newly issued '872 patent, filed the day it issued; Ramot counterclaimed. The patents belong to a "Linearized Optical Digital-to-Analog Modulator" family, and Ramot is Tel Aviv University's industry-liaison/technology-transfer arm. The court criticized forum maneuvering by both sides. Venue here is D. Del.; Ramot's earlier suits against Cisco alone were filed in the E.D. Texas.