US 8279603

I'll run targeted searches for this exact patent number and check for any 2026 litigation activity.

US 8,279,603 B2 — Analyst Summary

Search scope note: I ran open-web searches targeting this exact number (Google Patents mirror, FreePatentsOnline, Justia, aggregator/inventor databases, and patent-litigation docket aggregators). USPTO PatentCenter/Public PAIR and the CAFC 2026 argument/opinion dockets were not directly accessible to me in this session, so the legal-status items below are from secondary sources plus the patent text itself. I found no CAFC 2026 docket activity, no IPR/PGR, and no district-court complaint naming US 8,279,603 in the results returned. That is a negative search result, not proof of absence.

Bibliographic Data (from the authoritative patent text)

Family (same priority, 3 US applications): US 12/503,567 → US 7,920,380; US 12/727,700 → US 7,778,031 B1; US 13/045,783 → US 8,279,603 B2.

Recorded security interests/assignments noted on the Google Patents page: assignment to Teradyne (2012-03-29); patent security agreement to Barclays Bank PLC (2015-04-27); release of Barclays security interest (2019-06-28); security interest to Truist Bank (2020-05-07). These are security filings, not ownership transfers; the listed current assignee remains Teradyne, Inc.

⚠️ Data-quality caution: Two aggregator pages surfaced in search displayed "lapsed due to failure to pay maintenance fee / patent expired" legal events alongside this number. On inspection those event logs belong to different patents shown on the same page (e.g., US 4,778,063 and the Xyratex-era US 2007/0195497 A1), not to 8,279,603. The 8,279,603 record itself shows Active. I cannot independently verify current fee status without PatentCenter access.

Abstract (verbatim key content)

A test slot cooling system for a storage device testing system includes a storage device transporter having first and second portions. The first portion includes an air director; the second portion is configured to receive a storage device. A test slot housing defines an air entrance and a transporter opening for receiving the transporter. The air entrance is in pneumatic communication with the air director of the received transporter. An air mover is in pneumatic communication with the air entrance for delivering air to the air director. The air director directs air substantially simultaneously over at least top and bottom surfaces of the received storage device.

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

Claim 1 — Closed-loop split-flow temperature regulation method

A method of regulating a storage device's temperature inside a testing system, comprising:

1. Receiving an air flow into an air entrance of a test slot housing;
2. Splitting that received flow into a first air flow and a second air flow;
3. At a substantially simultaneous time, directing the first flow over the top surface and the second flow over the bottom surface of the storage device; and
4. Directing the air flow to an air mover of the test slot cooling system that is configured for pneumatic communication with the housing's air entrance — the air mover delivering air into that entrance with the air moving along a closed loop path through the test slot housing and the test slot cooling system.

Plain reading: the core of Claim 1 is the combination of (a) splitting the flow so both major faces of the drive are cooled at once, and (b) a closed-loop recirculating air mover architecture. The "top/bottom simultaneously + closed loop" pairing, not any one element alone, is what is claimed.

Claim 9 — Parallel, non-recirculating traverse-then-cool method

A method comprising:

• Receiving an air flow in an air cavity of an air director within the test slot housing;
• Circulating the air along a path by directing it out of a first air exit and out of a second exit of the air director;
• Based on the first air exit: the air is directed over the top surface, parallel to that surface, and traverses the length of the device along the top;
• Based on the second air exit: the air is directed in the same direction over the bottom surface, in parallel with the top-surface flow, and without recirculation of the air over the device prior to sending the air to an air cooler, and traverses the length along the bottom;
• Wherein the circulation provides substantially even cooling; and
• Sending the air flow to the air cooler, which is configured to cool the air and return it to the air director for recirculation.

Plain reading: Claim 9 recites the ducting/traverse behavior in detail — both streams run the same direction along the full device length, concurrently, and the air is not looped back over the device until after it has passed the cooler. The negative limitation ("without recirculation … prior to sending the air flow to an air cooler") is the likely point of novelty/argument and a probable claim-construction battleground.

Claim 16 — Same method, generalized to opposite surfaces

Substantively tracks Claim 9 but recasts the two faces as a "first surface" and a "second surface" that are opposite one another, rather than top/bottom.

Drafting anomaly (flagged per the "interpret literally" rule): Claim 16 is internally inconsistent as issued — it first introduces "first surface"/"second surface," then reverts to "top surface" and "bottom surface" in the parallel-flow and traverse limitations, and recites "parallel to the top surface" in a clause that refers back to the first surface. Similarly, Claim 9 recites a "second exit" in one step and a "second air exit" in the next. These appear to be claim-drafting carryover errors; I am reporting them exactly as they appear rather than correcting them, and they would be relevant to any § 112 indefiniteness challenge.

Notable Dependencies / Fallback Positions

• Claim 2 → air director that directs over top and bottom surfaces.
• Claim 3 → storage device supported in a transporter with first portion carrying the air director, receiver portion facing the device's rear surface.
• Claim 4 → air director has an air entrance and first/second air exits (claim 4's mapping of exits to bottom/top is inverted relative to the specification's FIG. 11/16 description — note the spec says first air exit 834 = top, second 835 = bottom).
• Claim 5 → cavity + plenum in the cavity directing air out the first air exit. The specification ties this plenum to a vibration-damping weight (the air director/plenum may be weighted to stabilize the transporter), which is the vibration-control thread running through the disclosure.
• Claim 6 → air mover receives air along a first direction and delivers along a substantially perpendicular second direction.
• Claim 7 → air flow over an air cooler upstream of the air mover.
• Claim 8 → performance envelope: up to about 0.122 m³/min (4.308 CFM) and 20.88 mmH₂O (0.822 in H₂O).
• Claims 10–15 → mirror claims 6, 7, 8 and the transporter/plenum structure in the Claim 9 family.

Commercial/Technical Context From the Specification

• The air mover is disclosed as a Delta Electronics DC Blower BFB04512HHA-8A60, ~45 mm L × 45 mm W × 10 mm H, impeller ~7,100 rpm. Its horizontal orientation is credited with lowering test slot stack height and thereby increasing rack test-slot density; its internal ~90° flow redirection is credited with reducing conduit pressure losses.
• The air cooler is a finned body (fins 924) coupled to a liquid-cooling tube carrying chilled water.
• The disclosure expressly contrasts its approach with sequential single-face cooling, arguing that one-side-first routing preheats the air before it reaches the second side ("preheated"), reducing efficiency — this is the design rationale underwriting Claims 1 and 9.
• Related concurrently-filed applications incorporated by reference: "Conductive Heating" (Ser. No. 12/503,593) and "Storage Device Temperature Sensing" (Ser. No. 12/503,687).

Uncertainty Disclosure

1. Litigation check: No case, IPR, or CAFC 2026 appeal naming US 8,279,603 was returned. A 2026 Teradyne-related patent suit did appear — Sensor360 LLC v. Teradyne Robotics A/S, No. 2:26-cv-00008 (E.D. Tex., filed Jan. 6, 2026; dismissed with prejudice Feb. 25, 2026) — but nothing in the docket snippet identifies 8,279,603 as an asserted patent, and the defendant is a distinct Teradyne entity. Do not treat that case as related to this patent without confirming the asserted patent numbers from the complaint.
2. Prosecution history: I do not have the file wrapper, so I cannot state what art was applied or what arguments were made during prosecution of the 13/045,783 continuation.
3. Current fee/status: As noted above, aggregator legal-event logs are contaminated with other patents' data. Status is best confirmed via USPTO PatentCenter.

I'll run targeted litigation searches for this exact patent number.

Let me run more targeted searches on litigation databases and known Teradyne enforcement.

Let me check the Unified Patents portal patent page and Justia dockets directly for this patent.

Litigation Search: US Patent 8,279,603 ("Test slot cooling system for a storage device testing system")

Bottom line: I found no litigation naming US 8,279,603 as an asserted patent. This is a negative search result based on the searches I was able to run — not proof of absence. Details, sources, and caveats below.

Method and limitations

I was also unable to open the Unified Patents patent-specific page or a PACER docket for US 8,279,603 directly (tool/step limits), so I cannot state with certainty that no case exists. Treat the following as "no known litigation located," not "no litigation exists."

Adjacent case that surfaced repeatedly — and why it does not include this patent

Xyratex Technology, Ltd. v. Teradyne, Inc.

• Court: U.S. District Court, Central District of California (presiding: Judge S. James Otero, "SJO (PLAx)"; Los Angeles)
• Case No.: CV 08-04545 SJO (PLAx)
• Filed: July 11, 2008 (Xyratex complaint alleging Teradyne disk-drive-test products infringed an Xyratex patent; Teradyne filed separate complaints alleging Xyratex infringed two Teradyne patents and engaged in anticompetitive conduct)
• Outcome: settled — Settlement Agreement dated December 14, 2009, resolving all pending litigation between the parties
• Source grounding: Teradyne, Inc. Form 10-K (filed ~March 1, 2010), "Commitments and Contingencies" note: http://getfilings.com/sec-filings/[100301](/patent/100301)/TERADYNE-INC_10-K/ — plus litigation exhibits captioned in the case itself (e.g., "Teradyne, Inc's Prior Art Notice Pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 282, Case No. CV 08-04545 SJO (PLAx), Oct. 16, 2009").

Why this case cannot involve US 8,279,603: the case was fully settled on December 14, 2009, while 8,279,603's earliest priority date is July 15, 2009 (parent Ser. No. 12/503,567) and it did not issue until October 2, 2012. A patent that issued in 2012 cannot have been asserted in a 2008 case terminated in 2009. Any suggestion that 8,279,603 was litigated in the Xyratex case is therefore incorrect.

Why an absence of litigation is plausible here

US 8,279,603 is the third member of a three-application Teradyne family (US 7,920,380; US 7,778,031 B1; US 8,279,603 B2) claiming the same July 15, 2009 priority. All three are method claims directed to internal cooling architecture of Teradyne's own storage-device test slot hardware. Teradyne is a practicing manufacturer and, based on the record I could see, has not used this family offensively against competitors after the Xyratex dispute was settled in 2009. That is consistent with a portfolio whose main defensive use was in the 2008–2009 Xyratex litigation window — before this patent issued.

Cross-checks against the previously generated section

• The prior section noted the Sensor360 LLC v. Teradyne Robotics A/S, No. 2:26-cv-00008 (E.D. Tex., filed Jan. 6, 2026; dismissed with prejudice Feb. 25, 2026). My searches again returned nothing linking that case to 8,279,603, and the defendant is a different Teradyne entity. I agree with the prior section's caution: do not treat that case as related to this patent.
• No contradiction found between my results and the prior section. The prior section's characterization of 8,279,603's legal status as "Active" (fee status unverified) stands.

What I would need to give a definitive answer

1. PACER / CourtListener RECAP docket search on the exact string "8,279,603" and on assignee "Teradyne" across D. Mass., C.D. Cal., E.D. Tex., and D. Del.
2. Unified Patents litigation portal patent page for US-8279603 (shows any district-court, ITC, or PTAB event tied to the patent).
3. USPTO PatentCenter "Patent Litigation" tab / assignment records for 13/045,783.

Given the searches I was able to run, my answer is: no litigation involving US 8,279,603 is known to me. If you can supply a PACER or Unified Patents portal export, I can verify that conclusion and produce the case-by-case table you asked for. I want to be explicit that I could not verify the absence with high confidence from the sources available in this session.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings" record against live sources before writing.

Let me check the sibling family patents and any Teradyne-related challenges, since IPRs often target the whole family.

Verification note (read first)

The canonical list supplied in the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal — returns zero AIA trial proceedings for US 8,279,603. I ran four independent live searches to test that negative: (1) "8,279,603" IPR/PTAB, (2) the sibling family numbers 7,920,380 / 7,778,031 against PTAB and reexamination, (3) Teradyne / Xyratex storage-device-testing IPR activity, and (4) aggregator platforms (Unified Patents portal, Docket Alarm, Google Patents family/legal-events view). None returned an IPR, PGR, or CBM naming this patent. I could not reach PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts) or the PTAB Decisions database (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions) directly this session, so the absence is a strong negative search result rather than a certified null — but it is corroborated by the ODP structured block, and the two agree. This is also consistent with the earlier-generated section of this analysis, which reached the same negative on PTAB activity (no contradiction to flag).

Proceedings overview

Total proceedings: 0. Breakdown: 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denied. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is the opposite of the two usual poles: the patent is neither "hardened by surviving IPRs" nor "hollowed out by canceled claims" — it is completely untested at the PTAB, with all 16 claims alive and no estoppel of any kind running in anyone's favor. That cuts both ways for you: there is no free kill (no FWD canceling claim 1 that you can hand the court), but there is also no adverse PTAB record, no claim-construction ruling, and no patent-owner-favorable institution decision you must overcome. Your invalidity fight, if you want one, starts from scratch.

Proceedings (none on file)

No proceedings to report. Per the instruction not to invent proceeding numbers, I am listing none rather than fabricating placeholders.

What exists in the same orbit, and must not be mistaken for a PTAB proceeding:

Why no IPR was ever filed — the practical explanation. US 8,279,603 was granted 2012-10-02, during the very first months of AIA-trial availability, and its effective filing date is 2009-07-15. Two structural consequences:

1. PGR was never available on this patent. Post-grant review under 35 U.S.C. § 321 applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. The '603's 2009-07-15 priority date (via continuation of Ser. No. 12/503,567) puts it in the pre-AIA window. Do not let any demand letter or "we'll PGR it" posturing suggest otherwise.
2. CBM was never viable. Covered Business Method review under AIA § 18 was limited to patents claiming a financial product or service. A test-slot air director for disk-drive test racks claims no such thing. Zero CBM exposure attaches to this patent, ever.
3. That leaves IPR as the only AIA vehicle — and IPR is now gated by discretionary denial plus the § 315(b) one-year bar running from service of a complaint. If the patent has sat in the portfolio unasserted since 2012, no petitioner ever had a complaint served on them to start the clock, and accused parties evidently chose district-court invalidity (like Xyratex did, pre-AIA) or design-around rather than PTAB.

Strategic summary

Claim status: 16 of 16 claims UNTESTED. Zero CANCELED. Zero SUSTAINED (in the PTAB sense). Independent claims 1, 9, and 16, and all dependents 2–8 and 10–15, stand exactly as issued on 2012-10-02. They have never been construed by the Board, never subjected to an instituted ground, and never amended in a post-grant proceeding. If the patent owner's demand letter cites claim 1, there is no FWD to wave back at them; conversely, if you want to argue claim 1 is invalid, you cannot cite a PTAB holding that anyone else already proved it. The only published record of claim scope is the prosecution history of application 13/045,783, which the prior section correctly notes is unavailable to this analysis.

Estoppel landscape: empty on both sides. Because nothing was ever instituted, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to nobody. No petitioner, no privy, no real party in interest is precluded from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground in a civil action. Equally, the patent owner has not had the benefit of any PTAB ruling validating a claim, so there is no collateral-estoppel flank to defend. Practically: every prior-art ground in existence against 8279603 — whether or not it appeared in any prosecution reference list, including the Xyratex-era § 282 art — remains available to you in district court without estoppel risk, subject only to the ordinary rules of the forum (e.g., narrowing invalidity contentions) and the patent's own file-history estoppel, if you can obtain the wrapper.

Pattern signals: no petitioner pattern, no aggregator, no appeal activity. There is no serial-petitioner footprint (contrast the multi-petition campaigns visible elsewhere in the search results), no Unified Patents / RPX-style defensive-aggregator IPR in the chain, and therefore no FWD to appeal and no CAFC docket number to give you. Teradyne as a patent owner appears to have enforced this family offensively in the pre-AIA district-court era rather than absorbing PTAB hits on it.

The single most important strategic fact for 2026. Since the '603 issued in 2012, it was in force for 14 years as of today (2026-09-28), against a 2029-07-15 anticipated expiration — roughly 2.8 years of remaining life. That age is now decisive at the institution stage. Under the March 26, 2025 "settled expectations" memorandum and the subsequent October 16–17, 2025 Squires memorandum centralizing all IPR/PGR institution decisions in the Director, patents in force six-plus years face heightened discretionary-denial risk, and the Office has documented a wave of largely unreasoned summary denials. Any new IPR you file on this patent is therefore fighting a discretionary gate, not a merits panel. See https://www.willkie.com/publications/2025/10/ptab-announces-new-institution-policy and https://irwinip.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/PTAB-2025-Review-Article-4926-2114-7521.1.pdf. The October 2025 proposed rules (barring an IPR on a patent that already survived a validity challenge, and requiring a § 102/§ 103 venue stipulation) would, if finalized, make a fresh challenge to an old, never-challenged patent like this one even less attractive — but note they affect IPR only; ex parte reexamination is expressly untouched.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant being asserted against today:

1. Do not budget for an IPR as your primary invalidity play. The merits may be strong, but the discretionary gate on a 14-year-old patent is a real, possibly dispositive, hurdle, and there is no parallel litigation posture (e.g., a rapidly looming trial date that favors denial, or an ITC investigation) that reliably counsels either way. If you file anyway, prepare a petition that also builds a compelling-merits record, since that remains the practical escape hatch from discretionary denial.
2. If you are subject to a § 315(b) clock, calendar it now. The one-year bar runs from service of the complaint on you; it does not begin because some other party was sued years ago. If you are the first party ever served on this patent, you are on a clean slate — and the first petitioner on a clean patent is the only one who ever gets a non-stale shot.
3. Preserve your district-court invalidity case in full. With § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaching to no one, nothing you can raise has been compromised by a prior PTAB proceeding. Mine the Xyratex prior-art record (Teradyne's own 2009 § 282 notice and the amended joint trial exhibit list are public and are cited throughout this family's prosecution references) — that art was developed against the very same 2009–2010 Teradyne family from which the '603 descends, which makes it unusually on-point against the '603's July 15, 2009 priority date.
4. Consider ex parte reexamination if you want an Office-side challenge without the discretionary gate. It is not subject to the Director's new institution control, and a substantial new question of patentability is a materially lower bar than IPR institution. It does not create § 315(e)(2) estoppel and does not carry the IPR page-costs.
5. Attack the claim-drafting anomalies the prior section identified. Independent claims 9 and 16 contain internal inconsistencies (Claim 9's "second exit" vs. "second air exit"; Claim 16's drift from "first/second surface" back to "top/bottom surface" in the parallel-flow and traverse limitations, including a "parallel to the top surface" clause that refers back to the first surface). These are § 112(b) indefiniteness candidates and, more usefully for you, claim-construction levers — particularly around the negative limitation in Claim 9's "without recirculation of the air flow over the storage device prior to sending the air flow to an air cooler," which appears to be where the patent owner will have to stake its scope.
6. Get the file wrapper. The prosecution history of 13/045,783 is the only contemporaneous record of claim-scope positions, and it is not in front of me. Pull it from USPTO PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and confirm current maintenance-fee status at the same time — the prior section flagged that aggregator legal-event logs for this number are contaminated with other patents' lapse events.

On the trial-stage milestones you asked about: there are none. With zero pending proceedings, there is no institution-decision deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one-year FWD due date to track. If you file, the § 314(b) deadlines will be 6 months (patent owner preliminary response window / optional institution deadline) and, if instituted, a FWD within 1 year of institution under § 318(a) — but treat those as contingent, not current, dates.

Caveat restated: this is a negative finding on PTAB activity, not a certification. Two things could change it and are worth a direct paid-docket check before you rely on it: (a) a very recent petition not yet ingested into the ODP structured data or surfaced by the searches I ran, and (b) any AIA proceeding filed under a family member rather than the '603 number itself. Verify against PTAB E2E at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts and the PTAB Decisions database at https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions using the application number 13/045,783 as your primary key.

I'll search for the recorded assignment history and ownership chain for this patent.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 8,279,603 B2

Source and scope caveat (read first): The USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) and the legacy assignment index (https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) were not directly queryable in this session. The assignment facts below are taken from the legal-events record carried in the authoritative patent text (the Google Patents record for US 8,279,603, which is itself populated from the USPTO assignment feed), and cross-checked against Teradyne's SEC filings where available. I was unable to retrieve the reel/frame numbers or the recorded correspondents of record for any of these four events. I have not invented them. Anything below that requires reel/frame is marked [reel/frame not retrieved] and should be confirmed at the Assignment Center by searching patent number 8279603.

Inventors

Unusual patterns: None found. The relevant anomaly screen is "all inventors departed the original assignee within 12 months of filing, which often precedes a portfolio fire-sale." Here the opposite holds: both inventors appear as a repeat team across at least four co-pending Teradyne applications in the same 2009 docket, and both executed the assignment to Teradyne. That is the signature of a stable in-house engineering group, not a departing-inventor scenario. No 2009–2011 departure, resignation, or spin-out activity involving either inventor surfaced in search. ⚠️ I could not verify employment dates from a primary HR/SEC source, so "no departure" is a negative search result, not a positive confirmation.

Original assignee

Teradyne, Inc. — a Massachusetts corporation, publicly traded (NASDAQ: TER), headquartered at North Reading, MA at the relevant times. Named as both Original Assignee and Current Assignee on the issued patent.

• Primary line of business: semiconductor automated test equipment (ATE) — the core Teradyne business — plus, at the time, a storage device / disk-drive test systems product line built around the automated transporter + multi-slot rack architecture described in this patent.
• Product embodying the claims: Teradyne did commercialize a disk-drive test platform matching this specification's architecture (robotic transporter 550, test slot 310, per-slot closed-loop air mover/cooler). The specification's explicit vendor call-out — Delta Electronics DC Blower BFB04512HHA-8A60, 45 mm × 45 mm × 10 mm, ~7,100 rpm — is a production BOM item, which is strong evidence this was engineered for a shipping product rather than a paper filing.
• Current status: Operating. Teradyne remains a going concern and has never filed for bankruptcy protection. Its corporate family has been acquisitive: GenRad (2001), Eagle Test Systems (2008), Nextest Systems (2008), LitePoint (2011), Energid Technologies (2018) — all of which appear as co-grantors on the 2019-06-28 security-interest release below, confirming the collateral bundle covered the whole Teradyne IP family.
• ⚠️ Uncertainty: I do not have high-confidence, current information on the disposition of Teradyne's storage/HDD test product line (whether it was divested, wound down, or continues). I am not asserting a divestiture. The patent's ownership is unaffected by any product-line decision — no assignment of this patent away from Teradyne was recorded.

Assignment timeline

Chronological, per the patent record's legal events. All four events are recorded; execution dates are noted where the record supplies them. [reel/frame not retrieved] for every entry.

• Executed [date not retrieved] / recorded 2012-03-29 — Reel [not retrieved]/****

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest (inventor → company)
  • Assignor: KRIKORIAN, NICHOLAS C.; MERROW, BRIAN S.
  • Assignee: TERADYNE, INC.
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved]
  • Context: Ordinary employee invention assignment perfecting Teradyne's title in the 13/045,783 continuation of the 2009 parent. This is the only ownership transfer in the chain.

• Executed 2015-04-27 / recorded 2015-04-27 (or shortly after) — Reel [not retrieved]/****

  • Conveyance: Patent Security Agreement (grant of security interest — not a transfer of title)
  • Assignor: TERADYNE, INC.; LITEPOINT CORPORATION
  • Assignee: BARCLAYS BANK PLC, as collateral agent
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved]
  • Context: Securitization. Corroborated by Teradyne's Form 8-K dated April 27, 2015: Teradyne entered a five-year, $350M senior secured revolving credit facility with Barclays Bank PLC as administrative and collateral agent, "collateralized by assets of the Company and such subsidiaries." Lien filing over the IP portfolio, not a sale. Teradyne retained ownership throughout.

• Executed [date not retrieved] / recorded 2019-06-28 — Reel [not retrieved]/****

  • Conveyance: Release of Security Interest in Intellectual Property
  • Assignor: BARCLAYS BANK PLC, as collateral agent
  • Assignee (released grantors): TERADYNE, INC.; LITEPOINT CORPORATION; EAGLE TEST SYSTEMS, INC.; NEXTEST SYSTEMS CORPORATION; GENRAD, LLC; ENERGID TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved]
  • Context: Lien discharge on payoff/refinancing of the 2015 Barclays facility. The six named grantors are the Teradyne corporate family (acquired entities listed above) — confirming this was a portfolio-wide credit collateral release, not a targeted patent transaction.

• Executed 2020-05-07 / recorded 2020-05-07 — Reel [not retrieved]/****

  • Conveyance: Security Interest (see document for details)
  • Assignor: TERADYNE, INC.
  • Assignee: TRUIST BANK, as collateral agent
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved]
  • Context: Re-securitization. Replacement credit-facility lien granted to Truist after the Barclays discharge. Teradyne retains full ownership; Truist holds a contingent security interest only.

Net effect: One ownership transfer (inventors → Teradyne, 2012). Three encumbrance events (Barclays lien 2015, Barclays release 2019, Truist lien 2020) that never moved title. No assignment to any third-party acquirer, holding company, or licensing entity appears anywhere in the record.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8279603
    2009 : Parent application filed
    2011 : Continuation application filed
    2012 : Inventors assign to Teradyne Inc
         : Patent issued
    2015 : Security interest granted to Barclays Bank
    2019 : Barclays security interest released
    2020 : Security interest granted to Truist Bank
    2029 : Anticipated expiration

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — in the specific sense defined by the rubric: only the original assignment exists, with no subsequent title transfer to analyze.

Justification: the record contains exactly one ownership conveyance — inventors Merrow and Krikorian to Teradyne, Inc., recorded 2012-03-29 — followed by three non-title transactions: a Barclays Bank PLC patent security agreement dated 2015-04-27, a release of that security interest recorded 2019-06-28 (naming the Teradyne family grantors: Teradyne, LitePoint, Eagle Test Systems, Nextest, GenRad, Energid), and a Truist Bank security interest dated 2020-05-07. Every NPE signal above is either affirmatively not present or unverifiable for lack of correspondent data; none is present on the evidence. Teradyne is an operating, publicly listed ATE manufacturer that commercialized a storage-device test platform matching these claims and has never been in bankruptcy, so no predatory chain exists to grade. The practical takeaway is that US 8,279,603 remains with its original operating-company owner and shows no NPE or privateering activity on any record I could reach.

Verification: search patent number 8279603 at the USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (legacy index: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) — and pull reel/frame plus correspondents for the four events above. Cross-check the legal-event list at https://patents.google.com/patent/US8279603/en and the Barclays facility at Teradyne's Form 8-K of April 27, 2015.

Residual unknowns (stated rather than guessed): (a) all four reel/frame numbers; (b) all four correspondents of record, and therefore the repeat-correspondent signal in full; (c) execution date of the 2012 inventor assignment (is it 2009, carried over from the parent, or re-executed for the continuation?); (d) current maintenance-fee status — the aggregator fee-event logs noted in the prior section are contaminated with other patents' data and should not be relied on.

I'll search for this exact patent and its citation record.

Let me pull the actual citation lists (patent and non-patent) for this number.

Let me retrieve more of the cited-reference list and verify the key cooling references.

Search-scope statement (read first)

I ran open-web searches against the exact number 8279603 (Google Patents mirror, FreePatentsOnline, Justia, uspto.report, Unified Patents, and the patentimages PDF corpus). Three constraints on what follows, stated up front rather than buried:

1. I did not have a live USPTO PatentCenter / PTAB / PACER session. Everything below derives from the patent text you supplied (authoritative) plus secondary mirrors.
2. The authoritative text you gave me truncates the citation list. The "Citations (399)" block runs from US 557,186 down to US 4,495,545 and then stops mid-list. I could not enumerate all 399 references. What I could reconstruct — and what appears in the mirror list for the sibling family member (JP 2011-507147 A, the Japanese national-phase of the same Teradyne cooling family) — tells me the list is dominated by three art groupings: (a) disk-file internal air circulation, (b) electronics-cabinet/rack forced-air cooling, and (c) disk-drive production test chambers. I cover the most probative ones; I am not claiming to have covered all 399.
3. I did not find the examiner's § 102/§ 103 rejections. No file wrapper was accessible, so I cannot tell you which of these 399 references was actually applied against the claims versus merely listed in an IDS. That distinction matters enormously and I flag it where it would change the answer.

What the citation record actually is

Two things worth stating plainly, because they change how a § 102 analysis should be framed:

• The great majority of the 399 citations are applicant-submitted IDS references, not examiner-applied art. The Justia record for 8,279,603 shows the citation list is padded with Cardinal Intellectual Property search reports for ten-plus other Teradyne applications (12/727,150; 12/727,201; 12/727,619; 12/726,856; 12/727,207; 12/727,700; 12/775,560; 12/760,164; 12/760,305; 12/856,056; 12/767,142; 12/766,680; 12/767,113), two Office Action / Accelerated Examination Support Documents from 12/727,700, a long block of Teradyne-filed PCT search reports, and the Xyratex v. Teradyne trial exhibits (Exs. 1, 2, 1314, 1315, 1326; Prior Art Notice under § 282; Amended Joint Trial Exhibit List, C.V. 08-04545 SJO (PLAx)). That is bulk disclosure of an entire litigation/portfolio record, not a curated anticipation set.
• The family is not prior art against itself, and I will not treat it as such. US 7,920,380 (Ser. 12/503,567), US 7,778,031 B1 (Ser. 12/727,700), and this patent's own pre-grant publication US 2011/0157825 A1 all share the July 15, 2009 priority and the same inventive entity. Likewise the two applications incorporated by reference — "Conductive Heating" (Ser. 12/503,593) and "Storage Device Temperature Sensing" (Ser. 12/503,687) — are not § 102 art against this patent. Anyone building an invalidity chart from the citation list must strip these out first.

Critically for the § 102 question you asked: almost nothing in this list is a true single-reference anticipatory reference. The claims are method claims whose novelty sits in a combination (split flow over two opposed faces + closed-loop recirculation + no recirculation over the device before the cooler). The cited art is overwhelmingly apparatus art from adjacent fields. I therefore report each reference against the claim(s) it is most relevant to, and mark honestly whether it reads as § 102 (anticipatory) or § 103 (obviousness-only). I flag my low-confidence characterizations.

Most relevant prior art, with dates and claim mapping

Group A — Disk-file closed-loop air circulation (closest to the "closed loop path" limitation)

Group B — Cabinet / rack forced-air cooling (closest to "air mover + housing + path")

Group C — Disk-drive production test / burn-in (closest to "storage device testing system")

Group D — Non-patent literature (§ 102(b)-eligible printed publications)

§ 102 anticipation analysis — the honest bottom line

No citation in the record I could retrieve anticipates any of independent claims 1, 9, or 16 as a single reference. My reasoning, claim by claim:

Claim 1 requires (i) air into a test slot housing entrance, (ii) splitting into first/second flows, (iii) simultaneous delivery over top and bottom faces, and (iv) an air mover delivering into that entrance along a closed loop path. The closed-loop disk-file art (A1, A2) supplies only element (iv)'s concept, and does so inside a drive rather than a slot. The cabinet art (B1–B8) supplies air movers and housings but not split-face DUT flow. No reference supplies (ii) + (iii) at all. → § 103 territory only.

Claim 9 adds the negative limitation — bottom-face air directed "without recirculation of the air flow over the storage device prior to sending the air flow to an air cooler" — plus the traverse-the-length and "substantially even cooling" recitations. This is the hardest limitation in the patent and, in my view, the intended point of novelty. The closest structural analogue surfaced in the broader art corpus is WO 2005/024831 A (Xyratex Technology Limited), described in a related search report as a "disk drive carrier assembly comprising … a baffle arrangement for splitting an air stream entering the casing at a first end." That is a splitting reference on point for element (ii) of claim 1 — but I could not confirm it appears in the 8,279,603 citation list, and it is a carrier split, not a top/bottom simultaneous split, so on the face of the summary it still does not anticipate. → § 103 candidate at most.

Claim 16 is the same method as claim 9 with the faces generalized to "first surface"/"second surface" that are "opposite." As flagged in the earlier section, claim 16 is internally inconsistent as issued (it introduces first/second surfaces, then reverts to "top surface"/"bottom surface" and recites "parallel to the top surface" in a clause referring back to the first surface). That defect is a § 112(b) issue, and it also means a § 102 mapping onto claim 16 would be slippery for either side.

Vibration/weighting. The specification (and claims 5, 13, 38) ties the plenum to a vibration-damping weight. Group C6 (US 4,685,303) and the Suwa "Rotational Vibration Suppressor" / "Evaluation System for Residual Vibration from HDD Mounting Mechanism" NPL are the vibration thread's art — but the asserted independent claims do not recite weighting, so those references do not bear on 1/9/16.

What I could not verify (state this in any final report)

1. The remaining ~330 cited references beyond US 4,495,545 (the authoritative text truncates there). Several relevant categories almost certainly continue below that point — notably later disk-drive test-slot cooling art and Xyratex patents from the 2005–2008 window.
2. Which references the examiner actually applied. "Cited" ≠ "applied." I have no Office Action or Notice of Allowance for Ser. 13/045,783. Given that the file is a continuation with substantially the same disclosure as US 7,920,380, and given the Accelered-Examination Support Document from sibling 12/727,700 appears in the record, the prosecution was likely streamlined — but I am inferring, not reporting.
3. The exact text of claim 16's inconsistencies — I report them as they appear in the issued text you supplied, uncorrected, per the literal-interpretation rule.
4. Per the operating rule, I have not auto-corrected any identifier. The pre-grant publication surfaced in one mirror as "US 2011/0013362" while the authoritative text and Justia both give US 2011/0157825 A1 for this application; I treat 2011/0157825 as correct for the '603 and have not silently reconciled the other.

Definitive answers would require: (i) USPTO PatentCenter document download for Ser. 13/045,783 (full IDS + any Office Actions), (ii) the complete machine-readable citation list from the Google Patents/INPADOC record, and (iii) PTAB/Global Dossier for any post-issuance challenge. With those, this table can be closed out reference-by-reference and each § 102/§ 103 tag verified rather than inferred.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis in the prior art cited on this patent's page and verify key reference details before applying § 103.

Good grounding so far. Let me verify the content of the most on-point cited references before applying § 103.

Obviousness Analysis — US 8,279,603 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the earlier bibliographic, claim-mapping, and litigation sections. I do not repeat the claim-by-claim dependency map or the drafting-defect discussion; I extend both.

1. Governing standard, date, and scope

Statute/regime. US 8,279,603 issued from Application 13/045,783, filed March 11, 2011 — before March 16, 2013 — so pre-AIA § 103(a) governs (no AIA § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership safe harbor is available, and § 103(c) applies only in its pre-AIA form).

Critical date. The claims are presumed entitled to the July 15, 2009 filing date of parent Ser. No. 12/503,567 (US 7,920,380) under § 120. I therefore analyze art as of 2009-07-15; anything published or patented before that date is § 102(b)/§ 102(a) art, and granted patents/applications of others filed before that date are § 102(e) art.

Standard. Graham v. John Deere (scope/content of art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations) as modified by KSR Int'l v. Teleflex — a combination is obvious where the references are from the same field or a field of endeavor, the problem is known, and there is an articulated reason with a rational underpinning (express teaching, design incentive, "known technique to improve similar devices," "obvious to try," predictable variation).

⚠️ A threshold point that materially narrows the patentee's position (extends the prior "drafting anomaly" flag). The weighted plenum — the vibration-damping feature the earlier section identified as the vibration-control thread of the disclosure, and the feature that distinguished claim 1 of parent US 7,920,380 ("wherein a plenum comprises a weight configured to reduce movement of the storage device transporter") — is not recited in any of the 16 claims of US 8,279,603. Claims 5 and 13 here recite only that "the plenum is configured to direct at least a portion of air … out of the first air exit," with no weight limitation. The continuation was deliberately broadened away from the one limitation that carried the strongest non-obviousness story (vibration damping). Any § 103 analysis must therefore be run without the weight limitation, and the patentee cannot rely on the weighted-plenum disclosure for a secondary-considerations nexus.

2. The prior art of record on this page

The page's "Prior Art" material comprises (a) keyword fields — air, storage device, air flow, test slot, director — and (b) a Citations (399) list, of which the fetched text exposes the pre-1986 portion plus (via the identical list on the parent, US 7,920,380, at https://patents.justia.com/patent/[7920380](/patent/7920380)) the 1985–2000 portion. The following are the references I judged most probative. Items marked ✅ I verified in this session; items marked ⚠️ I have only from the citation list/title and flag as unverified full text.

Not prior art — important negative. US 7,920,380 (parent), US 7,778,031 B1, US 8,116,079 B2, US 2011/0064546 A1 and US 2011/0013362 A1 are same-inventor / same-family documents. They are not "by another" for § 102(e), and § 103(c) would in any event disqualify them; because 8,279,603's claims take the 2009-07-15 date, they are also not § 102(b) art. Any obviousness theory must be built on third-party art — which is precisely what the Xyratex (Atkins) references supply.

3. Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

A designer of automated disk-drive test systems with a mechanical/thermal-engineering background: familiarity with centrifugal ("squirrel-cage") blowers and their 90° inlet-to-outlet turn; with per-slot vs. batch thermal control architecture; with duct/plenum distribution and baffling; and with the field's recognized concerns (thermal uniformity, drive vibration/NRRO, and rack density). Critically, the specification itself concedes that the air mover is a catalogue part (Delta BFB04512HHA-8A60, ~45×45×10 mm, ~7,100 rpm) — so the blower and its perpendicular flow behavior are admitted prior art, and the numeric envelope of claim 8 is the blower's rated output, not a design achievement.

4. Mapping of the independent claims to the art

Claim 1 (split flow + simultaneous top/bottom + closed loop)

Claim 1 requires no element that is absent from the combination of Atkins '368/'996 + Hamid '143.

Claims 9 and 16 (parallel, same-direction, full-length traverse; no recirculation over the device before the cooler; cooler returns air to the director)

Claim 16 adds nothing substantively over claim 9; it merely recasts top/bottom as opposite "first/second surfaces" (and, as the earlier section flagged, reverts to "top/bottom" mid-claim). Its limitation set is the same and the same art maps to it.

Dependent claims

• 6 / 11 (perpendicular inlet/outlet): inherent in any centrifugal blower; the specification admits the blower is an off-the-shelf Delta part, and US 5,793,610 (Schmitt) is cited as air-regulation/ducting art. In re known-element-for-its-known-purpose applies squarely.
• 7 / 14 (air cooler upstream of the air mover): Atkins heat exchanger 16/18 upstream of fan 6 in cooling mode ✅; Xyratex '579 cooler ✅.
• 8 / 15 (up to 0.122 m³/min, 20.88 mmH₂O): the rated performance of the admitted prior-art blower; "up to about" also reads on arbitrarily low flow. No patentable weight, and no narrowing effect.
• 3 / 12 (transporter with air director in first portion, rear surface facing it) and 4 / 13 (air director entrance + two exits; plenum in cavity): Xyratex '579 (carrier module with air-input port directing air over the drive, releasably fastened to the fan/cooler module) + US 2007/0195497 A1 and US 6,826,046 (carrier/mounting art) supply the transporter-integrated structure. ⚠️ The specific "rear surface substantially facing first portion" orientation I could not verify in full text.

5. The specific combinations, and why a PHOSITA would have made them

Combination A — Atkins '368/'996 + Hamid '143 (+ conventional blower), against claims 1, 6, 7, 8.
Both references are in the same field of endeavor (thermal management of disk drives during test) and both address the same problem the patent recites (keeping the test environment within tight temperature limits without degrading the drive).

• Express teaching: Hamid supplies the explicit functional goal — "an even flow of air over each drive," with turning vanes/apertures that split a single circulated stream into branch flows, and a closed-loop recirculation that conserves conditioned air.
• Design incentive / market force (KSR rationale B): Atkins is a per-slot device whose stated object is to minimize "the volume (principally the height) occupied," i.e., to increase the number of devices per rack — the same density pressure the '603 specification identifies. Applying Hamid's vane/aperture splitting to Atkins' per-slot fan so that both faces of the drive are washed at once is a predictable improvement serving that stated goal.
• Known technique, same way (KSR rationale C) + predictable result: splitting a ducted stream to distribute it evenly is a known technique; using it to feed two opposing faces yields the predictable, and stated-to-be-desirable, result of avoiding preheating of the air before it reaches the second face — a problem the '603 specification itself identifies as the deficiency of sequential one-face-first routing.
• Obvious to try (rationale F): Given a recognized preheating problem, there are a finite number (essentially two) of predictable solutions — cool the two major faces sequentially or concurrently. Concurrent blowing of both faces is the more efficient, and the specification concedes the tradeoff in exactly those terms.

Combination B — Atkins '368/'996 + Xyratex '579 + Hamid '143, against claims 9, 16, 10–15.
Claims 9/16 add (i) full-length, same-direction, parallel traverse of both faces and (ii) the negative limitation "without recirculation … prior to sending the air flow to an air cooler."

• Atkins already discloses the negative limitation in its cooling mode: air over the drive → aperture 16 → heat exchanger → aperture 18 → fan → back to the drive. ✅
• Xyratex '579 supplies the carrier-to-module pneumatic interface (input port in register with output port) and the cooler, which reads on the "air director in the test slot housing … return to the air director" architecture.
• Hamid supplies the parallel/even distribution and the closed recirculating loop.
• Motivation: these are the same three solutions to the same problem in the same field, each contributing its known function; the combination produces nothing more than the expected aggregate of those functions — uniform, non-preheated, recirculated cooling.

Combination C — Xyratex '579 + US 2007/0195497 A1 / US 6,826,046 (+ Hamid), against claims 3, 4, 12, 13.
The carrier-with-air-input-port + releasably-fastened fan/cooler module architecture is Xyratex's own, in the same rack-slot context; adding Hamid's split-flow distribution gives an air director in the transported carrier that issues two exits.

Alternative single-reference theory worth flagging: Atkins '368/'996 alone comes close to claim 1 on its face — a per-slot temperature-control device whose fan flow is directed at the drive while the tray's bottom openings circulate air around it, with a recirculating (closed-loop) return path. Whether that is anticipation under § 102 or merely obviousness under § 103 depends entirely on whether one reads "directing … first air flow over at least a top surface and … second air flow over at least a bottom surface" as requiring distinct, deliberately bifurcated flows rather than air that incidentally wraps the drive. I would not stake a validity opinion on the § 102 reading, but as a § 103 primary reference it is strong, and it would make claim 1 exceedingly difficult to sustain in combination.

6. Where the § 103 case is weakest (steelman for the patentee)

1. No single reference discloses the whole combination. The Xyratex material is per-slot but is framed around a temperature-control module and a tray/carrier, not a "test slot housing" with an "air entrance … in pneumatic communication with the air director of the received storage device transporter" (dependent claims 3/4/12 are the most exposed here).
2. The negative limitation. If "without recirculation … prior to sending the air flow to an air cooler" is construed as permitting no recirculation at all before cooling, the patentee will argue Atkins' valve permits a recirculate-only mode and so does not disclose the limitation. The counter is that the claim is limited to "recirculation … over the storage device," and Atkins' cooling mode satisfies it. Claim construction, not art, is the battleground.
3. Hamid is chamber-scale, not slot-scale. Its vanes/apertures distribute air among shelves, not across two faces of one drive; the patentee will argue non-analogous scale. That is a weak argument where the art is the same field and the claimed function (distributing one flow to plural paths) is structurally identical.
4. Secondary considerations: essentially none available. The record I can see shows no unexpected-results evidence, no licensing, no copying, and no known litigation verdicts. And the strongest non-obviousness hook — vibration-damping by weighting the plenum — was surrendered in this continuation's claims, which also severs any nexus argument.
5. Better invalidity theories may exist outside § 103. The earlier section's drafting defects (claim 9's "second exit"/"second air exit"; claim 16's "first surface"/"top surface" inconsistency, carried unchanged from pre-grant pub US 2011/0157825 A1, which shows the same text at its claim 41) create § 112(b) indefiniteness exposure under Nautilus. Separately, the near-identical independent claims 1, 9, and 16 — and their overlap with parent US 7,920,380 and sibling US 7,778,031 — raise obviousness-type double patenting questions that would depend on whether terminal disclaimers were filed (⚠️ I cannot verify this without the file wrapper; I do not know whether a terminal disclaimer was filed.).

7. Bottom line

On the art of record and the art I verified, claims 1, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, and 15 are, in my assessment, at high risk under pre-AIA § 103, most plausibly over Atkins (US 2007/0034368 A1 / US 7,612,996 B2) in view of Hamid (US 5,851,143), with a conventional centrifugal blower supplying the perpendicular-flow and performance-envelope elements (which the patent itself admits are off-the-shelf). The recited elements are each known, the references are in the same field addressing the same problem, and the asserted benefit (avoiding preheating by cooling both faces at once) is the predictable result of a known flow-splitting technique applied with a stated design incentive (slot height/density) — the classic KSR combination. Claims 9 and 16 are also vulnerable, principally through the Atkins cooling-mode disclosure of pass-then-cool; their survival depends almost entirely on how narrowly "without recirculation … prior to sending the air flow to an air cooler" is construed, and, secondarily, on the § 112 defects already flagged. The dependent claims adding the plenum (5, 13) add little, because the continuation dropped the weighted-plenum limitation that was 7,920,380's distinguishing feature.

Confidence: moderate-to-high on the combination rationale; moderate on claim-by-claim outcomes, because (a) I could not review the file wrapper for this continuation (so I do not know what art was applied or what arguments were made as to claims 1, 9, and 16, which are new relative to 7,920,380), and (b) the full text of several cited references (US 4,967,155; US 5,793,610; US 4,145,299; US 4,233,644; US 6,826,046; the Behl/Schmitt/Anderson drive-bay art) was not retrievable in this session and is marked ⚠️ above. Those unverified references are secondary support, not load-bearing; the analysis rests on Atkins and Hamid, both of which I read directly. No contradictions were found with the previously generated sections; the only refinement is the observation that the weighted-plenum limitation is absent from all 16 claims of this patent, which sharpens rather than contradicts the earlier section's treatment of the plenum/weight thread.