SMART Modular Technologies, Inc.

Company overview. SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. ("SMART") is a specialty memory and storage company founded in 1988 and headquartered at 39870 Eureka Drive, Newark, California. It is not independent: it operates as the Integrated Memory business of Penguin Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: PENG), the enterprise technology company formerly named SMART Global Holdings (SGH) and renamed Penguin Solutions in October 2024. SMART itself was previously public (1995 IPO; again in 2006), was acquired by Solectron in 1999, and was taken private by Silver Lake Partners in 2011. Penguin Solutions reported roughly $1.37 billion in FY2025 revenue and about 2,900 employees group-wide; SMART Modular is not separately reported, so its own headcount and revenue are not disclosed.

Products / services / operations. SMART designs, assembles and tests specialty memory and flash storage — it does not fabricate DRAM or NAND wafers. Product lines include DuraMemory DRAM modules (DDR3/DDR4/DDR5 RDIMM, LRDIMM, SODIMM, NVDIMM, MIP, VLP), Zefr screened high-reliability DIMMs, CXL memory expansion modules (AIC and E3.S CMM), DuraFlash SSDs and flash products (SATA, PCIe/NVMe, eMMC, microSD, EDSFF), the RUGGED line of hardened SSDs for defense/aerospace, plus custom/ruggedized designs and value-added testing (SMART Memory Test Labs). Customers are OEMs in data center, networking, telecom, industrial/IoT, transportation, and military/aerospace. R&D is in California and Taiwan; manufacturing has been in Malaysia and Brazil, with the Brazil module business (81%) sold to Lexar/Longsys in 2023.

Patent-litigation posture. Operating company, not an NPE. The tracked cases all involve Netlist, Inc. and are a two-way dispute: SMART was a defendant in Netlist v. SMART Modular Technologies (C.D. Cal.) and Netlist v. SMART Storage Systems et al. (N.D. Cal.), and a plaintiff in SMART Modular Technologies v. Netlist (N.D. Cal., Aug. 2013), a declaratory-judgment action seeking non-infringement and invalidity of five Netlist memory-module patents after Netlist sent infringement notices over ULLtraDIMM. The one plaintiff-side filing is defensive DJ activity, not assertion.

Notable context. The Netlist dispute centered on Diablo Technologies' ULLtraDIMM and Netlist's self-test, NVDIMM and distributed-buffer patents (e.g., 8,001,434; 8,359,501), with parallel IPRs filed by SanDisk, Diablo and SMART; none of the tracked cases sits in the Eastern District of Texas.