Hillcrest Laboratories, Inc.

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Hillcrest Laboratories, Inc. (commonly "Hillcrest Labs") is a sensor-processing technology company founded in 2001 by Dan Simpkins as Hillcrest Communications, renamed Hillcrest Laboratories in 2005, and headquartered at 15245 Shady Grove Road, Rockville, Maryland. It was a venture-backed private company, raising roughly $60M across six rounds from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Columbia Capital, Grotech Capital and AllianceBernstein. InterDigital, Inc. (NASDAQ: IDCC) acquired it in December 2016 for approximately $48M in cash. In July 2019 InterDigital sold Hillcrest's product business to a CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA) subsidiary for about $11.2M, while retaining substantially all of the Hillcrest patent assets; CEVA took non-exclusive rights to those patents. Hillcrest therefore no longer operates independently. Employee count and standalone revenue were not verified from public sources.

Hillcrest developed Freespace, a free-space motion-control and sensor-fusion technology that converts MEMS accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer data into cursor and gesture input. Its product lines included the Freespace MotionEngine embedded software platform, embeddable Freespace sensor modules, and reference remote controls, plus earlier consumer products: the Loop pointer remote, the HoME television navigation system with a zoomable interface, and the Kylo TV browser. Freespace was licensed to consumer-electronics makers including LG, Roku, Logitech and Universal Electronics. CEVA states the technology has shipped in more than 100 million devices.

Hillcrest is an operating company that asserted its own developed patents — not a non-practicing entity. The case data shows 1 plaintiff case and 0 defendant cases, consistent with a one-time patent enforcer rather than a serial litigant or an NPE defending itself.

The single tracked case is Hillcrest Laboratories, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. et al., filed August 20, 2008 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland (Greenbelt), venue in Hillcrest's home district rather than a plaintiff-friendly forum like the Eastern District of Texas. Hillcrest simultaneously filed ITC Investigation No. 337-TA-658, seeking an import ban on the Wii and Wii Remote and asserting U.S. Patents 7,139,983; 7,158,118; 7,262,760; and 7,414,611 covering 3D pointing and a TV navigation interface. The parties settled on August 21, 2009 under a "licensing and settlement agreement" with financial terms undisclosed; Nintendo continued to deny infringement. Hillcrest withdrew the district court suit in October 2009.

Sources: Wikipedia (Hillcrest Labs); Hillcrest Labs press releases; InterDigital 2016 10-K and Q3 2019 results; CEVA 10-Q (Nov. 2019) and 2020 10-K; U.S. ITC notice, Inv. No. 337-TA-658 (Sept. 28, 2009); Bloomberg/Japan Times and Maryland Daily Record coverage of the Nintendo settlement.