Plaintiff
4 cases as plaintiff.
Company overview. Sentient Sensors, LLC is a privately held limited liability company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is the assignee of U.S. Patent No. 6,938,177 ("Multi-Chip Module Smart Controller"), issued in 2005 to sole inventor Kenneth Blemel, and it shares a real-party-in-interest relationship with Management Sciences, Inc. (MSI), a family-run Albuquerque engineering firm founded in 1976 that builds military/aerospace monitoring systems (roughly 14 employees per 2020 press coverage). No revenue, headcount, or valuation figures for Sentient Sensors itself are publicly available.
Products / operations. Sentient Sensors has no publicly visible product catalog or website. In its own PTAB filings it describes itself as a small, family-owned business that developed and sold military/aerospace instrumentation—including controllers used on helicopters and aircraft health-monitoring systems—and says products covered by the '177 patent were sold to U.S. military branches. The asserted patent covers a multi-chip-module "smart controller" pairing a processor with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for parallel, independent processing in monitoring/control applications. Its only publicly documented activity is enforcing that patent.
Litigation posture. Sentient is a plaintiff in 4 of its 5 tracked matters and a defendant in only 1—the Xilinx/AMD/ATI inter partes review—so its posture is that of a single-patent assertion campaign against semiconductor manufacturers. Its cases are concentrated in plaintiff-friendly venues: the Eastern District of Texas (Marshall Division) against Microsemi (2018) and the District of Delaware against Cypress (2019) and Xilinx (2022). RPX tracks the Microsemi suit; no source categorizes it as a pure shell, but it functions as a patent-assertion entity in these suits.
Notable cases. The active campaign is Sentient Sensors v. Xilinx (D. Del., 2022), paralleled by IPR2023-00195, in which the PTAB found the challenged claims obvious (Final Written Decision, Sept. 2024) and the Federal Circuit affirmed summarily in April 2026. Earlier related litigation by affiliated entity Blemel Technologies against National Instruments was dismissed. The Cypress and Microsemi cases were dismissed with prejudice.
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Sentient appealed the IPR2023-00195 Final Written Decision to the Federal Circuit; oral argument was held April 8, 2026, and a docket entry around April 10, 2026 suggests a decision, but the outcome is unconfirmed.
Sentient accused Xilinx's Zynq-7000, Zynq UltraScale+ (incl. Kria), and Versal product families of infringing the '177 patent; stayed pending IPR2023-00195.
Sentient accused Microsemi's FPGA/SoC products (e.g., SmartFusion 2) of infringing the '177 patent; terminated by joint motion to dismiss with prejudice.
Sentient accused Cypress's PSoC 3/4/5/6 Programmable System-on-a-Chip product lines; a claim-construction memorandum opinion issued January 28, 2021; terminated by joint motion to dismiss with prejudice.