Agere Systems Inc. was an integrated-circuit components company headquartered in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was incorporated on August 1, 2000 as a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, completed an IPO on the NYSE (ticker AGR) in April 2001, and was fully spun off from Lucent on June 1, 2002. At formation it reported roughly $4.7 billion in annual revenue and about 16,500 employees across 22 countries; headcount fell to about 7,200 by late 2003 after heavy telecom-driven restructuring. Agere ceased to exist as an independent company on April 2, 2007, when it merged into LSI Corporation in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $4 billion. LSI was later acquired by Avago Technologies (2014), which became Broadcom Inc. in 2016.
Products/operations. Agere designed and manufactured semiconductors and software for storage, mobility, and networking markets — read-channel chips and preamps for hard disk drives; baseband and processor technology for 3G/UMTS and GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile devices (via the 2005 Modem-Art acquisition); Wi-Fi/WLAN chip sets (including the ORiNOCO line); and modem, FireWire, SerDes, VoIP, network-processor, Ethernet, mapper/framer, and media-gateway ICs. It also had an optoelectronics components business (lasers, transmitters, amplifiers), which it exited in 2002–2003 to focus on ICs.
Litigation posture. Agere is an operating company, not a non-practicing entity. In the tracked data it appears as plaintiff in all four cases and as defendant in none. Its suits asserted internally developed patents covering wireless-LAN and storage technology, consistent with a product company enforcing its own R&D portfolio — the combined LSI/Agere entity reported more than 10,000 issued and pending U.S. patents at the 2007 merger.
Notable cases. Agere Systems Inc. v. Sony Corporation et al. (filed March 1, 2006, E.D. Tex., Marshall Division) asserted WLAN-related patents; an East Texas jury found Sony willfully infringed and awarded $18.5 million, with the case terminating in January 2009. The 2012 LSI Corporation et al. v. Funai Electric matters (ITC § 337 and C.D. Cal.) were filed after Agere's merger, by the successor entity. Much of the former Agere/LSI portfolio was later assigned to Bell Semiconductor LLC (Hilco), a licensing entity formed in 2017 that has asserted those patents in subsequent suits.