US 9878632

I'll search for the patent and any related litigation/docket information.

Let me search specifically for litigation and docket activity.

Let me check whether this specific patent is asserted in those cases and look for any Federal Circuit appeal.

US Patent 9,878,632 — Analyst Summary

Bibliographic data (authoritative, from the patent record)

Abstract (verbatim)

"A control system for controlling the supply of power from an energy storage system to a DC bus of a vehicle propulsion system is disclosed herein. The control system includes a controller programmed to monitor real-time operating parameters of a plurality of energy storage units of the energy storage system, access degradation models for the plurality of energy storage units, and optimize usage of the plurality of energy storage units during real-time operation of the vehicle propulsion system based on the degradation models."

Ownership / reassignment chain (as recorded)

GE → GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC (2025-03-26) → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC (2025-03-26) → Edison Innovations, LLC (recorded 2025-02-20) → Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC (quitclaim assignment, recorded 2026-04-09, assignor Edison Innovations LLC). Note: the recorded dates as displayed by Google Patents are non-monotonic (a 2025-02-20 record appears after two 2025-03-26 records), so the transfer sequence should be verified against USPTO Assignment records and not relied on as literally ordered.

Family (related filings listed on the face of the record)

US 14/480,002 → US 9,889,752 B2; US 14/479,937 → US 9,783,185 B2; JP 2015-160261 → JP 6659270 B2; EP 15181274.0 → EP 2987674 B1; KR 10-2015-0116698 → KR 102385058 B1; CN 201510764915.4 → CN 105437992 B; CN 202010411753.7 → CN 111746495 B; US 15/208,777 → US 10,081,350 B2; US 15/848,823 → US 2018/0134170 A1; JP 2019-182546 → JP 6972076 B2.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent has three independent claims: 1, 7, and 11 (claims 2–6 depend from 1; 8–10 depend from 7; 12–13 depend from 11).

Claim 1 — Control system. A controller has a database containing a different degradation model for each energy storage unit (ESU). It (a) determines an initial power split between a high-specific-power ESU and a high-specific-energy ESU; (b) monitors the state of charge (SOC) of each; (c) monitors the vehicle's power demand; (d) feeds the initial split plus the monitored SOCs into the two different degradation models to compute a change in SOC for each ESU; (e) checks whether that SOC change exceeds a stored threshold; and (f) selectively allocates power to the DC bus from the two ESUs in real time, based on the degradation models and the power demand, such that the SOC-change threshold is not exceeded.

Claim 7 — Method. A method performed with a controller whose database holds a charging degradation model per ESU: determine a power split between the high-specific-power and high-specific-energy ESUs at a first time; monitor each ESU's SOC at first and second times; input the split and SOCs into the different degradation models to obtain a change in SOC; determine a first power demand from a user input and/or a predetermined vehicle duty cycle; define a first power allocation; input the change in SOC into a system constraint function and modify the first allocation if that constraint is violated; then determine a second power demand and define a second, different power allocation that does not violate the constraint.

Claim 11 — Vehicle propulsion system. A bi-directional converter coupled to a DC bus; an energy storage system with a high-specific-power ESU (coupled to the converter) and a high-specific-energy ESU; and a controller configured with a database (presumably of per-ESU degradation models). ⚠️ Uncertainty flag: the fetched record truncated claim 11 after "a controller configured with a…". Based on the corresponding description, the controller's programmed functions are to determine a future power demand, define a plurality of power allocations from real-time operating parameters and the degradation models, and control the bi-directional converter to transfer power from the first ESU to the DC bus according to those allocations, the allocations being optimized in real time on the basis of the future power demand and the degradation models. I do not have the verbatim full text of claim 11 or of dependent claims 12–13, so treat this paragraph as a paraphrase, not a quotation.

Notable prosecution/drafting observations

• The granted claim 1 is materially narrower than the published application's claim 1 (US 2016/0052417 A1), which broadly recited "monitor real-time operating parameters… access degradation models… and optimize usage." The granted version adds the high-power/high-energy ESU pair, the SOC-change computation via different degradation models, and the threshold limitation — an apparent response to prior art.
• Claim 7 contains an internal-recitation irregularity ("inputting the initial power split" where the claim earlier says "determining a power split") and refers to a "charging degradation model," whereas claim 1 refers to a "degradation model." These are as-published; I have not auto-corrected them.

Litigation / docket search — US 9,878,632 specifically

No 2026 CAFC docket, IPR, or district-court assertion of US 9,878,632 was found in my searches. What the searches did surface is Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC (a Dominion Harbor entity) asserting a different portfolio of GE-origin EV patents in the Eastern District of Texas:

• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Ford Motor Co., 2:25-cv-01116 (E.D. Tex., filed 2025-11-10) — resolved by joint dismissal 2026-02-11 (docket: https://cdn.pacermonitor.com/public/case/61108837/).
• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Toyota Motor Corp. et al., 2:25-cv-01133 (E.D. Tex., filed 2025-11-18) — asserted patents listed as US 10,291,158; 10,374,529; 10,442,296; 10,549,648; 11,374,508; 8,030,884; 8,086,364; 8,326,467; 9,914,365 (https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/308840).
• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., 2:26-cv-00230 / 2:26-cv-00231 (E.D. Tex., filed 2026-03-19/20) — asserted patents US 8,030,884; 8,487,582; 9,809,121; 9,914,365; 9,975,439; 10,604,023.
• Toyota Motor Corp. v. Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC, IPR2026-00250 (PTAB, filed 2026-02-03), challenging US 10,549,648 — a sibling GE patent (King et al., same multi-channel DC-bus family line) (https://sandbox.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2026-00250/).

Caveat / uncertainty: US 9,878,632 does not appear on any of the asserted-patent lists I retrieved, and I found no docket naming it. I cannot conclusively rule out that it is asserted in an unretrieved complaint or in a case where the patent list was truncated ("+2 more," "+4 more" in the Ex Parte party summary at https://ai-lab.exparte.com/party/bunker-hill-technologies-llc). Likewise, I found no Federal Circuit appeal caption mentioning 9,878,632. I do not have authoritative confirmation either way, and I have not fabricated a docket number.

Sources

• https://patents.google.com/patent/[US9878632B2](/patent/US9878632B2)/en (primary; full text supplied)
• https://patents.justia.com/patent/9878632 (granted claims 1–11 text)
• https://patents.justia.com/patent/20160052417 (published-application claims)
• https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/tag/Dominion+Harbor (Bunker Hill / Dominion Harbor activity)
• https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/308840 (Toyota case patent list)
• https://sandbox.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2026-00250/ (IPR on sibling US 10,549,648)

Bottom line: US 9,878,632 is a granted GE patent (now paper-assigned to Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC) claiming real-time, degradation-model-based power splitting between a high-specific-power and a high-specific-energy energy storage unit on a vehicle DC bus, with an SOC-change threshold constraint. I found no 2026 CAFC docket or PTAB proceeding directed at 9,878,632 itself; the 2026 activity I located involves different patents in the same GE EV-portfolio family.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 9878632.

Let me search litigation-specific databases with more targeted queries.

Let me search more specifically for recent litigation involving the current assignee and related entities.

Litigation Search Results for U.S. Patent No. 9,878,632

Finding: No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 9,878,632 was found.

I searched litigation-focused sources (Unified Patents litigation portal, PACER/CourtListener, general web searches for the patent number paired with "litigation," "lawsuit," and "infringement complaint") and located no case in which US 9,878,632 was asserted or otherwise at issue.

What the searches did return (and why it is not this patent)

• US 8,982,863 — Apple Inc. v. Smart Mobile Technologies LLC, IPR2022-01222 (PTAB), and related district court case Smart Mobile Techs. LLC v. Apple Inc., 6-21-cv-00603 (W.D. Tex.). This concerns a different patent (a cellular antenna/T-R patent) that shares a seven-digit number differing from the target. Not the same patent.
• U.S. Patent No. 5,987,863 — Exmark Mfg. Co. v. Briggs & Stratton Power Products Group, No. 10-cv-00187 (D. Neb.) (mower deck patent). Not the same patent.
• Various unrelated documents containing the digit string "9878632" as a phone access code, course code, etc. Not patent litigation.

None of these involve US 9,878,632.

About the patent itself (for context)

• Patent: US 9,878,632 B2, "Vehicle propulsion system having an energy storage system and optimized method of controlling operation thereof"
• Application: US 14/462,765; Filed: 2014-08-19; Granted/Published: 2018-01-30
• Original assignee: General Electric Company
• Inventors: Zhi Zhou, Robert Dean King, Jian Zhou, Fengcheng Sun, Zhihao Li
• Current assignee per Google Patents record: Bunker Hill Technologies LLC (via a chain of reassignments recorded in 2025–2026: General Electric → GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Edison Innovations, LLC → Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC)
• Legal status: Expired – Fee Related (adjusted expiration 2034-08-28)

Important caveats on completeness

1. I could not directly query the live docket databases (Unified Patents portal, PACER, CourtListener, Docket Alarm) in a targeted way within this session, and my final round of confirmatory searches (specifically for "Bunker Hill Technologies" patent suits, Edison Innovations litigation, and GE vehicle-propulsion patent suits) returned no responsive content. I therefore cannot certify this as an exhaustive negative with 100% confidence.
2. The recent ownership transfer is a risk factor. The patent was only recently (April 2026 record date) quitclaimed to Bunker Hill Technologies LLC, an entity that appears to be a patent-holding/monetization vehicle. Because ownership just changed hands, infringement litigation may have been filed very recently and might not yet be indexed in the sources I could reach. This should be re-checked.
3. I am not aware of any litigation with high confidence, but I am flagging this as "none found" rather than an absolute "none exists." A definitive answer would require directly running the patent number through PACER's national case search, the Unified Patents litigation caselist, and Docket Alarm (RPX), which I was unable to complete here.

Recommended next steps to confirm

• Search PACER (National Case Search / "Find a Case") for the patent number.
• Search Unified Patents litigation portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
• Check Docket Alarm / RPX Insight and CourtListener RECAP for both the patent number and for "Bunker Hill Technologies LLC" as a plaintiff.
• Given the April 2026 assignment to Bunker Hill Technologies LLC, monitor for newly filed complaints naming that entity as plaintiff.

If you can supply the outputs of those specific databases, I can compile the full case table (plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, status/outcome) you requested.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" default against public sources before drafting.

Let me check whether the reexam/monetization activity touches this specific patent, and whether Bunker Hill has asserted it.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 9,878,632: 0. Breakdown by status: active — 0; claims invalidated — 0; claims sustained — 0; settled — 0; institution denied — 0. The structured ODP block supplied in this prompt is the canonical list, and targeted web searches (Google Patents, PTAB/ptacts.uspto.gov, Unified Patents' portal, and the Bunker Hill/Dominion Harbor district-court dockets) surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming this patent. The bottom-line posture for a defendant is therefore: there is no PTAB estoppel cloud and no claim-level adjudication to hide behind — but also no invalidated claim to point at. Every claim of 9,878,632 is UNTESTED at the Board, and the defense case has to be built from scratch (with the patent's own file history and its lapsed legal status as the two most promising axes — see below).

Important caveat: two adjacent facts are frequently conflated with this patent in search results, and neither is a proceeding on 9,878,632:

• The IPR decisions that mention a "'863 patent" concern U.S. Pat. No. 8,982,863 B1 (Smart Mobile Technologies, e.g. IPR2022-01222), an unrelated wireless patent — not US 9,878,632.
• The Unified Patents ex parte reexamination against Bunker Hill Technologies concerns U.S. Pat. No. 9,914,365 — not this patent. Details below, flagged as not a proceeding on '632.

Because the count is zero, the per-proceeding template yields nothing to populate. Rather than pad it with speculation, the section below covers the only adjacent record that matters.

No proceedings on US 9,878,632 — adjacent activity only (NOT a proceeding on this patent)

Ex parte reexamination of US 9,914,365 (Unified Patents v. Bunker Hill Technologies)

• Type: Ex parte reexamination under 35 U.S.C. § 302 / § 303 — not an AIA trial (no PTAB involvement, no estoppel, no claim-cancellation-at-PTAB).
• Filed: 2026-03-27 (request); granted 2026-06-01 — CRU found substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims.
• Patent in dispute: US 9,914,365 — not 9,878,632.
• Procedural note: Request number and docket: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90016093
• Sources: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2026/3/29/dominion-harbor-entity-bunker-hill-ev-battery-patent-challenged (filing); https://unifiedpatents.squarespace.com/insights/2026/6/2/dominion-harbor-entity-bunker-hill-ev-battery-patent-challenge-granted (grant).
• Defensive value for you: none directly — but it is a strong pattern signal. It shows (a) Bunker Hill Technologies LLC (a Dominion Harbor NPE) is monetizing a GE-sourced EV/battery patent portfolio, and (b) Unified Patents is actively attacking that portfolio and picking off its patents one at a time through the CRU. If 9,878,632 is ever put in play, this is the template a defensive aggregator would use against it.

District-court campaign (context; 9,878,632 not confirmed as asserted)

• Bunker Hill Technologies LLC has asserted a GE-family EV/battery portfolio against Ford (E.D. Tex., filed 2025-11-10), Toyota (E.D. Tex., 2:25-cv-01133, filed 2025-11-18), and Nissan (2:26-cv-00230/00231, filed 2026-03-19/20).
• Docket: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txedce/2:2025cv01133/[241855](/patent/241855)
• I could not confirm that 9,878,632 is among the asserted patents. The asserted numbers retrievable from dockets and the Unified litigation portal are '467, '364, '857, '668, '023, '582, '439, '884, '365, '121, '529, '648, '296, '158, '508 — '632 does not appear. Treat "the '632 is being asserted" as unverified; do not rely on it without pulling the complaints.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. Because no petition was ever filed, no claim of 9,878,632 has been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the Board. There is no survivorship picture to draw (no "claims 1–5 canceled, claim 6 sustained" analysis exists here), and there is no FWD, no institution decision, and no PTAB panel to cite. Claims 1–13 stand exactly as issued on 2018-01-30.

Estoppel landscape: a clean field. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is triggered only by a petitioner that obtains an FWD. With zero IPRs, no one is estopped from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground against this patent — the full prior-art universe is available to a defendant, in both the district court and (if asserted) a fresh IPR. The only § 315(b) clock that matters is yours: if you were served with a complaint asserting '632, you have one year from service to petition. Ford and Toyota were sued in November 2025, so on 2026-09-30 their one-year windows are still open (roughly through mid-November 2026); Nissan's clock runs to roughly March 2027. Independent of any of that, ex parte reexamination has no time bar and no estoppel — the Unified/'365 play is available to any defendant here.

Pattern signals. Different petitioner each time is a non-issue because there is no petitioner at all. The patent owner (Bunker Hill / Dominion Harbor) has not appeared as a patent owner in any PTAB appeal, and there is no defensive-aggregator IPR in the chain — Unified's involvement with this portfolio has so far been CRU-only, and on a different patent. The absence of any IPR is itself informative: this patent has a 2014 priority date and has been in a monetization chain (GE → GE IP Licensing → Dolby IP Licensing → Edison Innovations → Bunker Hill, with a 2026-04-09 quitclaim), yet it has drawn no AIA challenge — consistent with a patent that is not (yet) the lead assertion in the campaign.

One high-value non-PTAB fact a defendant should run down immediately: per the structured patent data, US 9,878,632 is recorded as "Expired – Fee Related," adjusted expiration 2034-08-28, i.e., the patent has lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees even though its nominal term would have run to 2034. If that status is current, the patent cannot support prospective injunctive relief, and damages would be limited to infringement occurring before the lapse (subject to the six-year § 286 look-back) — with a live question whether the owner may yet petition to revive under 37 C.F.R. § 1.378. Verify the maintenance-fee history in Patent Center before building any theory on it, but this is likely to matter more than any IPR that does not exist.

Recommended next steps

1. Say it plainly in your invalidity contentions: there is no PTAB activity on US 9,878,632 — no IPR, PGR, or CBM has ever been filed. Do not cite a Final Written Decision; none exists. Any representation to the contrary (including conflating this patent with U.S. Pat. No. 8,982,863 B1) should be corrected.
2. Confirm the lapse. Pull the maintenance-fee and legal-status record for 9,878,632 in USPTO PatentCenter and confirm the "Expired – Fee Related" entry and the relevant lapse date. If confirmed, develop (a) an expired-patent/six-year-look-back damages defense and (b) an intervening-rights analysis under § 252 if any post-lapse revival is attempted.
3. Check whether '632 is actually in suit. Pull the complaints in Bunker Hill v. Ford (E.D. Tex., filed 2025-11-10), Bunker Hill v. Toyota (2:25-cv-01133), and Bunker Hill v. Nissan (2:26-cv-00230/00231) and confirm the asserted patent list. I could not verify '632 is among them.
4. If you are served, calendar the § 315(b) date immediately — one year from service — and file within it; nothing salvageable is lost by filing early, since no estoppel from a prior petitioner exists to leverage.
5. Consider ex parte reexamination as a parallel track, exactly as Unified did on the sibling '365 patent (request granted 2026-06-01; see https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90016093). It carries no time bar, no estoppel, and no need to win the "reasonable likelihood" institution fight — and it is aimed at the CRU rather than at a panel that already knows you.
6. Monitor the portfolio campaign. Track the Bunker Hill dockets and the Unified Patents insights page for new filings naming '632; the first challenge, if it comes, will almost certainly be an ex parte reexam rather than an IPR, given the '365 precedent.

Reference links: patent — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US9878632B2](/patent/US9878632B2)/en · PTAB E2E / Patent Trial and Appeal Board — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ · PTAB decisions — https://www.uspto.gov/PTAB · CourtListener (for any CAFC appeal, none found) — https://www.courtlistener.com/

I'll research the assignment record for US 9,878,632. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me dig into the specific assignment records and correspondent details.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 9,878,632 B2

Data limitation up front (read before using the timeline): I could not query the USPTO Assignment Center application directly — assignmentcenter.uspto.gov is a JavaScript application whose results are not exposed to text retrieval or indexing, and my searches did not surface the recorded reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record for any of this patent's post-issuance assignments. The five conveyance events below are reconstructed from the Google Patents legal-events (reassignment) records for US 9,878,632 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US9878632B2](/patent/US9878632B2)/en), which expose conveyance type, assignor, assignee and a date — but not reel/frame and not correspondent. I am therefore not supplying reel/frame numbers, because I will not invent them. Every event below should be re-verified against the Assignment Center at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (also https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Where I could not obtain a field, I say so.

Cross-reference note / refinement of the earlier section: The previously generated summary rendered the chain as "GE → GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Edison Innovations, LLC → Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC." The Google Patents legal events show that the GE IP Licensing → Dolby IP Licensing step is a CHANGE OF NAME, not an assignment of assets — i.e., the same legal entity was renamed after Dolby acquired GE Licensing. That is a refinement, not a contradiction, of the earlier chain.

Inventors

• Employer attribution. The application was filed on 2014‑08‑19 by General Electric Company with all five inventors assigning their interest to GE (see timeline, event 1). Co-inventors Robert Dean King and Zhi Zhou are prolific GE Global Research inventors in power electronics / energy storage, and third-party inventor-aggregation data lists Fengcheng Sun as holding 8 patents at GE (https://www.patentleaderboard.com/ge/fengcheng-sun/[1199921](/patent/1199921)). The natural reading is that the team sat within GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY, working on GE's energy-storage / hybrid-electric drive programs. I could not independently confirm each inventor's specific GE business unit from a primary source, so treat the business-unit detail as inference, not record.
• Unusual patterns: None detected, and none that I can support. All five inventors assigned to GE at filing, and the patent remained with GE for roughly a decade. I found no evidence of any inventor departing GE within 12 months of filing — and I explicitly decline to speculate, since no departure data appears in the record I could reach. There is no inventor-side signal of a pre-planned fire-sale.

Original assignee

General Electric Company (Schenectady, NY) — named as assignee on the issued patent and on the application as filed.

• Primary line of business: diversified industrial/technology conglomerate — power generation, aviation, healthcare, transportation (diesel‑electric locomotives and mining trucks) and industrial electronics.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Unclear / not established. The claims are directed to real-time, degradation-model-based power splitting between a high-specific-power and a high-specific-energy energy storage unit on a vehicle DC bus — squarely a hybrid/EV propulsion control. GE had genuine adjacent commercial activity (GE Transportation's diesel-electric and hybrid locomotive programs; the discontinued GE hybrid transit-bus program; and the GE Durathon sodium–metal-halide battery made in Schenectady — notably, the specification expressly lists sodium metal halide as an option for the second ESU). But I have no primary-source evidence of a shipped product reading on these claims, so I will not assert embodiment. What is documented is that GE ultimately treated the asset as licensing inventory, not product IP.
• Current status: The unified General Electric Company no longer exists; GE completed its three-way breakup in April 2024 into GE Aerospace, GE Vernova, and GE HealthCare (GE HealthCare spun off Jan 2023, Vernova April 2024). The assigning entity corresponds to the successor GE Aerospace, which retained the "GE Licensing" business and the GE brand/trademark portfolio. Primary-source support: Dolby's 6 June 2024 acquisition announcement quotes Robert Giglietti, "GE Aerospace's CEO of Corporate Holdings and Treasurer," and states GE Aerospace "will retain its portfolio of IP related to its core aerospace and defense technologies, as well as the trademark portfolio for the GE brand" (http://s27.q4cdn.com/365963565/files/doc_news/Dolby-Laboratories-Announces-Agreement-to-Acquire-GE-Licensing-from-GE-Aerospace-2024.pdf).
• Divestiture context (SEC/primary): On 2024‑06‑06 GE Aerospace agreed to sell GE Licensing — a portfolio of over 5,000 patents — to Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB) for $429 million all cash, closing in Dolby's FY2024 ("Dolby closes on GE Licensing acquisition," IAM, 2024‑09‑20). This was a strategic portfolio divestiture incident to the GE breakup, not a bankruptcy asset sale.

Assignment timeline

All five events are from the Google Patents reassignment record for US 9,878,632. Reel/frame numbers were not retrievable from my sources and are deliberately omitted. Correspondent of record likewise not retrievable.

• 2014‑08‑19 (executed) / recorded 2014‑08‑19 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor(s): Zhi Zhou; Robert Dean King; Jian Zhou; Fengcheng Sun; Zhihao Li
  • Assignee: General Electric Company, Schenectady, NY
  • Correspondent: not retrieved (record not reached)
  • Context: Original inventor-to-employer assignment, executed contemporaneously with filing.

• (executed date not exposed) / recorded 2025‑03‑26 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignor's Interest
  • Assignor: General Electric Company
  • Assignee: GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Internal corporate carve-out of the GE Licensing patent-holding function into a dedicated IP subsidiary, positioned for the Dolby transaction.

• (executed date not exposed) / recorded 2025‑03‑26 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Assignee: Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Change of name only — the acquired GE licensing entity was renamed under Dolby. Same legal entity; not an asset transfer. (This is why the earlier summary's "assignment chain" should be read as a rename at this step.)

• (executed date not exposed; record dated) 2025‑02‑20 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignor's Interest
  • Assignor: Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Assignee: Edison Innovations, LLC (a Dominion Harbor Enterprises company)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter — sale of ~2,500 non-core GE-origin assets from Dolby to Dominion Harbor's licensing vehicle. (Dolby retained all GE video-coding SEPs; the sold tranche covered displays, semiconductors, EVs, batteries, 5G/wireless and healthcare — Sisvel/IAM reporting, https://www.sisvel.cn/en/insights/thousands-of-patents-change-hands-with-licensors-seeking-cellular-video/.)

• (executed date not exposed) / recorded 2026‑04‑09 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Quitclaim Assignment
  • Assignor: Edison Innovations LLC
  • Assignee: Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC (a Dominion Harbor Enterprises company)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter within the same NPE family — EV/automotive assets moved from the Edison Innovations licensing arm into the Bunker Hill assertion vehicle. Dominion Harbor's own portfolio page: "Bunker Hill Technologies is actively assembling a growing portfolio of patented technologies focused on connected vehicle solutions" (https://www.dominionharbor.com/portfolio).

Recorded-date anomaly (flagged, not resolved). In the Google Patents event list, the 2025‑02‑20 Dolby→Edison record appears above the two 2025‑03‑26 records, and the Edison acquisition date precedes the GE→GE IP Licensing and GE IP Licensing→Dolby records. This is non-monotonic and means the displayed dates are a mix of execution vs. recording dates, or that Google's ordering is by record-addition rather than chronology. The logical order of the asset transfers is GE → GE IP Licensing → (rename) Dolby IP Licensing → Edison Innovations → Bunker Hill; the displayed dates should be treated as approximate until confirmed on the Assignment Center.

Correspondent — a caution against the obvious inference. Edison Innovations' public press releases route portfolio inquiries to Robert Kelly, Dominion Harbor (bob@dominionharbor.com, 214‑414‑1164). That is a licensing/marketing contact, not the USPTO correspondent of record on any recorded assignment, and it must not be entered into a chain-of-title table as such. The task's most valuable field — the recurring recording attorney — is exactly the field I could not obtain here.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9878632
    2014 : Filed by General Electric
         : Inventors assign to GE
    2018 : Patent issued
    2024 : GE Licensing sold to Dolby
    2025 : GE to GE Intellectual Property Licensing
         : Name change to Dolby IP Licensing
         : Dolby transfers to Edison Innovations
    2026 : Edison quitclaims to Bunker Hill

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT. The patent moved from an operating company (GE) into a chain of licensing-only vehicles: GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Edison Innovations, LLC → Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC, none of which ships a product. The terminus is a Dominion Harbor assertion vehicle. Concrete supporting evidence: Unified Patents describes Bunker Hill as "an NPE and entity of Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC" (https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2026/3/29/dominion-harbor-entity-bunker-hill-ev-battery-patent-challenged), and Dominion Harbor's Edison Innovations self-describes purely as a licensing company ("Edison Innovations, a Dominion Harbor Enterprises company, has licensed its portfolio…"). Dates: recorded 2025‑03‑26 / 2025‑02‑20 / 2026‑04‑09.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT (corporate parent), with a caveat as to this patent. Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC is a documented high-frequency plaintiff: Bunker Hill v. Ford, 2:25‑cv‑01116 (E.D. Tex.); Bunker Hill v. Toyota, 2:25‑cv‑01133 (E.D. Tex.); Bunker Hill v. Nissan, 2:26‑cv‑00230 / ‑00231 (E.D. Tex.); and it is the target of Toyota v. Bunker Hill, IPR2026‑00250 (PTAB) and an ex parte reexamination granted 2026‑06‑01 on US 9,914,365. Edison Innovations is Dominion Harbor's active licensing arm. None of the classic listed asserters (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi‑LAN, Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, etc.) appear in this chain. Caveat: US 9,878,632 does not appear on any asserted-patent list I could retrieve, and I found no docket naming it — so this signal is about the assignee's assertion profile, not this patent's.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (not retrievable). The correspondent of record for all five recordings could not be retrieved; neither assignmentcenter.uspto.gov nor the Google Patents legal-events feed exposes it. I therefore cannot confirm or deny that a single attorney/firm ran these recordings. This is the single most important open item in this analysis — a recurring correspondent across the 2025‑02‑20, 2025‑03‑26 (×2) and 2026‑04‑09 records would upgrade the shell-entity finding to a documented pattern. Do not assume recurrence — verify it.

4. Cascading transfers — PRESENT. Four recorded transfers in roughly 14 months (2025‑02‑20 through 2026‑04‑09), through chained LLCs, two of which share the same recording date (2025‑03‑26). Three distinct assignee entities in that window (GE IP Licensing, Dolby IP Licensing, Edison Innovations, then Bunker Hill). Strong structural signal.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT as to this patent. There is no infringement suit naming US 9,878,632, so no "assignment within 6 months before suit" can be established. (The 2026‑04‑09 Edison→Bunker Hill quitclaim does post-date Bunker Hill's Nissan complaints by ~3 weeks, but the Nissan suits do not assert this patent, so that timing proves nothing here.)

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. GE did not file Chapter 7/11. The GE→Dolby transfer was a $429M cash strategic divestiture incident to the GE three-way breakup; Dolby's subsequent sale of ~2,500 non-core assets to Dominion Harbor was portfolio rationalization. No bankruptcy proceeding is implicated.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. No evidence that GE is directing or sharing in assertion revenue. GE sold the portfolio outright to Dolby, which sold a tranche to Dominion Harbor; GE retains no apparent assertion interest. Not a privateering arrangement on the record I have.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The inverse signal applies: the patent has not been neutralized.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

The chain terminates at Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC, which Unified Patents explicitly identifies as "an NPE and entity of Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC", and the asset travelled from an operating company (GE) through a renamed licensing entity (GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC, "Change of Name," recorded 2025‑03‑26) and a licensing arm (Edison Innovations, LLC, recorded 2025‑02‑20) before a quitclaim into the assertion vehicle (Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC, recorded 2026‑04‑09) — that is a shell-entity/licensing-only transfer plus cascading transfers plus a known-asserter parent, i.e. well past the 2-strong-signal threshold. The one caution is that US 9,878,632 itself is not, on the evidence I could retrieve, among the patents Bunker Hill has asserted (its suits to date name a different GE-origin EV set — e.g. US 9,914,365; 9,975,439; 10,291,158; 10,374,529; 10,604,023). The confidence call is about who owns it and why, not about a filed case; the missing reel/frame and correspondent fields should be pulled from the Assignment Center before this is relied on for anything dispositive.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 9878632) — and pull, for each of the five records, the reel/frame and correspondent fields, which are the two gaps in this reconstruction.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 9,878,632. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me try to retrieve the "References Cited" list directly from the patent document and Justia.

Let me try to access the patent's citation list from other databases.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 9,878,632 B2

⚠️ Important limitation up front (please read before using this)

I was unable to retrieve the actual "References Cited" / patent-citation list for US 9,878,632 B2. This is a factual limitation, not a stylistic choice, and it materially constrains the deliverable you asked for:

1. The authoritative full text you supplied (fetched from https://patents.google.com/patent/US9878632B2/en) jumps from the Classifications section directly to the Definitions/Abstract/Description and Claims. It does not contain the front-page "(56) References Cited" table, nor the Google Patents "Citations / Cited By" tables.
2. My targeted searches for the citation list (Google Patents citations tab, Justia, Espacenet, the patent PDF front page) returned the patent's bibliographic/classification data but not the §56 references.
3. My search budget was exhausted before I could open a citation-list-bearing source.

Therefore I will not fabricate citations. Listing specific reference numbers and mapping them to claims under §102 without having the actual cited documents would produce exactly the kind of invented detail I'm required to avoid. What follows is (a) what I did verify, (b) the correct analytical framework and the claim-element maps you need to slot the references into, and (c) flagged leads and a precise retrieval path to complete the work.

Also note the date discrepancy: your task header says April 26, 2026, while the system date is 2026-09-30. It does not change the analysis below, but flagging it per the "no auto-correction" rule.

1. Verification of the specific number 9878632

The search for the exact number 9878632 resolves to the following record (no similar-number substitution):

No results for adjacent numbers (e.g., 9,878,633; 9,882,863) were merged in. Note that during the search, unrelated matches containing the digit string "9,882,863" and "5,987,863" appeared; these are different patents and are excluded.

2. What the §102 analysis must target (claim-element maps)

Anticipation under 35 U.S.C. § 102 requires a single reference disclosing every limitation of a claim. The three independent claims are the attack surface. Based on the authoritative claim text (claims 1 and 7 verbatim; claim 11 paraphrased from the record due to truncation):

Independent Claim 1 — critical limitations a single reference must show:

• Controller + database with a different degradation model for each ESU;
• an initial power split between a high-specific-power ESU and a high-specific-energy ESU;
• monitoring SOC of each ESU and the power demand;
• inputting the initial split + monitored SOC into the two different degradation models to determine a change in SOC (ΔSOC) for each ESU;
• determining whether ΔSOC exceeds a threshold; and
• selectively allocating power in real time based on the degradation models and power demand such that the threshold is not exceeded.

Independent Claim 7 — method variant, requiring additionally a "charging degradation model" per ESU, SOC monitored at first and second times, a power demand from a user input and/or predetermined vehicle duty cycle, and feeding ΔSOC into a system constraint function before modifying the allocation.

Independent Claim 11 — system variant: bi-directional converter + DC bus + high-power/high-energy ESU pair + controller determining a future power demand, defining a plurality of power allocations from real-time operating parameters and the degradation models, and controlling the converter to transfer power accordingly.

Practical implication for §102: Given the granted claim 1 was narrowed relative to published claim 1 (adding the high-power/high-energy pair, the per-ESU different-model ΔSOC computation, and the threshold), the most dangerous references will be ones disclosing model-based, degradation-aware power-split control between heterogeneous (power-type vs. energy-type) storage devices on a vehicle DC bus. A generic "hybrid energy storage" reference will not anticipate claim 1 unless it affirmatively computes ΔSOC via separate degradation models and applies a threshold test.

If a reference discloses most-but-not-all limitations, it is an obviousness candidate under § 103, not § 102 — worth flagging explicitly in the final chart.

3. Verified leads on candidate prior art (NOT confirmed citations)

The only substantively relevant item the search surfaced in connection with this patent number is:

• US 8,307,930 B2 — "Scalable, hybrid energy storage for plug-in vehicles." This GE-origin patent appeared on a Google Patents page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8307930#4) in a table that also listed US 9,878,632 B2 (General Electric, 2014-08-19 / 2018-01-30). The page showed a "Citations (63)" table header. This is a lead only — I could not confirm whether US 9,878,632 cites US 8,307,930, whether US 8,307,930 is cited by 9,878,632, or merely appears as a "similar document." It is topically in the same hybrid-energy-storage-for-vehicles space and is the single most plausible candidate, but do not represent it as a confirmed §56 reference without verifying the front page.

I have no verified named §102 references to report. I will not guess at numbers such as US 2011/xxxxxxx or US 8,xxx,xxx.

4. How to retrieve the actual cited-references list (to complete this task)

The §56/§102-relevant list lives in these places — any one of them will give you the verbatim citations:

1. USPTO Patent Public Search (https://ppubs.uspto.gov) → search 9878632 → open the full document → the "(56) References Cited" table on the front page lists every U.S. patent document, foreign document, and (where present) NPL reference.
2. USPTO PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) → application 14/462,765 → view the issued patent PDF front page (same §56 table) and the "References Cited" / IDS" entries in the file wrapper.
3. Google Patents → Citations tab (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9878632B2/en → "Citations" and "Cited By" sections; the page's machine-readable scholar/metadata endpoints expose these programmatically).
4. Espacenet → "Cited documents" for US9878632 (https://worldwide.espacenet.com).
5. The grant PDF on patentimages.storage.googleapis.com — front page, column 1 "(56) References Cited."

Once you supply any one of those outputs, I can immediately produce the requested table: full citation · publication/filing date · brief description · claim(s) potentially anticipated under § 102, plus the § 103 fallback mapping for references that disclose the architecture but not the threshold/ΔSOC limitations.

5. Bottom line

• The number 9878632 resolves correctly and uniquely to US 9,878,632 B2; no similar numbers were substituted.
• I could not obtain that patent's cited-references list from the sources reachable in this session, and the authoritative full text you provided does not include it. Accordingly, I cannot responsibly name specific prior-art references or assign them to claims under § 102 at this time — doing so would be fabricated citation matching.
• The claim-element maps in §2 tell you exactly what a qualifying § 102 reference must disclose; §3 gives one flagged lead (US 8,307,930 B2); §4 gives the exact retrieval paths.

Uncertainty flag / contradiction note: The previously generated "Patent summary" states claim 11 was truncated in the fetched record. That remains true here, so any claim-11 anticipation conclusion should be held until the verbatim claim text is confirmed. No contradiction with the earlier sections was found; this section is consistent with, and expressly limited by, the missing §56 data.

I'll research the prior-art landscape for this patent's claim limitations before building the § 103 analysis.

I have some prior-art leads. Let me pull the specific references cited on the face of this patent and its siblings, plus the full claim set.

Obviousness Analysis — US 9,878,632 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

⚠️ Three method notes before I begin, because they affect how much weight to put on this analysis:

1. The "Prior Art section of this page" was not actually present in the record I was given. The authoritative full text you supplied contains a "Prior art keywords" field (power, esu, energy storage, specific, propulsion system) but no Citations / References Cited table. My attempt to retrieve the face-of-patent citations and the EPO/ISA search reports for this family was cut off by a tool step limit. Every reference below is one I surfaced by search, not one I can confirm appears in the patent's "References Cited" section. Treat the reference list as a candidate-ground set requiring verification against the USPTO file wrapper.
2. Date conflict. Your task header says current date is April 26, 2026; my operating instructions say September 30, 2026. I have flagged it rather than silently choosing; nothing in the analysis turns on it.
3. I have not verified filing/publication dates for every reference (noted inline). A § 103 ground collapses if a reference postdates the 2014-08-19 priority date, so dates must be confirmed before any ground is relied on.

1. Legal framework applied

Graham v. John Deere factors: (1) scope/content of the prior art; (2) differences between art and claims; (3) PHOSITA level; (4) secondary considerations. Under KSR, a combination is obvious where the references are from the same field, address the same problem, and the combination is "a predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions." No teaching-away or unexpected-results evidence appears in this record.

PHOSITA: a controls engineer with an M.S. (or equivalent experience) in power electronics/motor drives and 3–5 years in HEV/EV energy management, familiar with battery SOC/SOH estimation and drive-cycle modeling.

2. Claim decomposition (limitations that need to be met)

3. Candidate prior art

Post-dated — usable only as background/state-of-the-art evidence, NOT as § 103 art:

• US 2022/0203844 A1 (Cummins, priority 2020-12-30): splitting power between battery/supercapacitor/fuel cell using life-loss functions ΔL = f(β, γ), offline DoE, and LUTs.
• US 10,740,991 B2: central controller with "a set of aging models for the respective component," monitoring SOH of each of several storage components and controlling them to balance SOH toward a common value.
• WO 2018/209038 A1, EP 3 072 729 A2 (Toyota, pub. 2016-09-28 — post-dates our priority date).

These are instructive: they show the claimed subject matter became the textbook approach — but a § 103 ground must not rest on them.

4. Proposed grounds of rejection

Ground 1 (strongest): US 9,290,107 in view of US 8,790,215

• Why combine: both are GE-era EV/HEV propulsion power-management disclosures in the same field, addressing the same problem the '632 patent itself states — avoiding battery oversizing and thermal/cyclic stress by controlling how each storage element is used. US 9,290,107 supplies the complete hardware/architecture plus SOC sensing and demand sensing; US 8,790,215 supplies the missing control limb: read the storage device's degradation state (age/SOH/throughput limit) and adjust the power command until the degradation-related limit is satisfied.
• Motivation (KSR): (i) same field, common problem; (ii) predictable use — a power-split controller taking an additional input (a degradation variable) and constraining its output is the established function of both references; (iii) design incentive — extended pack life, reduced oversizing, lower cost, exactly the object stated in the '632 Background.

Ground 2: US 9,290,107 in view of US 8,307,930

• Why combine: US 8,307,930 expressly balances "state of charge and wear of the battery population" across multiple storage units and estimates SOC and remaining battery life. A PHOSITA seeking to operate the two dissimilar ESDs of US 9,290,107 (high-power vs. high-energy) so as not to over-stress either would look directly to a reference that apportions use between storage units according to measured SOC and predicted life. This meets "database comprising a degradation model for each ESU" + "allocate … based on the degradation models."
• Predictable result: the claimed outcome — both ESUs used within an SOC-change bound rather than one being cycled to death — is the expected consequence of wear-balancing, not an unexpected result.

Ground 3: WO 2014/091238 A2 (Teva Motors), alone or with US 8,790,215

• The ISA already rated this reference "X" (anticipatory) for all claims of a closely related GE EV energy-storage application. If its disclosure matches that rating (electrically-propelled vehicle with battery/ultracapacitor hybrid storage and power-split control), it would likely render claim 1 and claim 11 obvious — and possibly anticipated. I could not read it, so I flag this ground as unverified.

Ground 4: the older Y-art set (Hino JP H10-14002; Werth US 4,931,947; Vance US 2012/091964/63; Hitachi EP 2 043 218; Honda EP 2 075 870; CEA WO 2012/171917/35) in view of US 9,290,107

• These were the EPO's chosen Y-combinations for claims 1–5 and 7–11 of a 13-claim case, with claims 6, 12 and 13 rated "A." That claim set is structurally the same shape as the '632 patent's (13 claims). This is a strong signal that the broad power-split/SOC/constraint concepts were already a crowded field — but I cannot currently map a document to a limitation.

5. Where the claims are least vulnerable (patentee's counter-arguments)

1. The ΔSOC-from-degradation-model gate is genuinely specific. Prior art I located uses SOH, throughput, or capacity as the degradation variable (US 8,790,215; US 8,307,930). Claim 1 requires the degradation model to output a change in state of charge and then gates allocation on an SOC-change threshold. No reference I found does that exact computation. A patentee can argue this is not a mere substitution of one known variable for another, but a different control architecture.
2. Two different degradation models, one per ESU, in a live split loop. US 8,307,930 estimates remaining life generally; it does not clearly teach per-chemistry models driving a real-time split between a high-power and a high-energy unit.
3. Prosecution history cuts in the patentee's favour. Per the earlier section, the granted claim 1 was materially narrowed from published claim 1 (US 2016/0052417 A1) by adding precisely the high-power/high-energy ESU pair, the ΔSOC-via-different-degradation-models computation, and the threshold. That is affirmative evidence the examiner did not find these elements combined in the art of record — a meaningful obstacle to a § 103 rejection built only on art that was before the examiner.
4. Claim 7's "charging degradation model" is narrower still; if the art models only discharge-side aging, that is an additional hook (though US 8,790,215 addresses charge/discharge throughput limits).
5. Secondary considerations — none in the record. No unexpected results, no licensing, no commercial-success evidence surfaced. Note the record shows the patent is "Expired – Fee Related" (adjusted expiration 2034-08-28), i.e., maintenance fees were not paid; that is at most weak, negative evidence of commercial significance and is not a § 103 factor, but it is relevant to litigation-enforcement risk.

6. Conclusion

• Claims 1, 7 and 11 are, on the record I could assemble, vulnerable to § 103 over US 9,290,107 (architecture/SOC/demand sensing) + US 8,790,215 (degradation/SOH/throughput-limited allocation) and over US 9,290,107 + US 8,307,930 (SOC-and-wear balancing across storage units, remaining-life estimation), with motivation supplied by the same-field/same-problem overlap and the explicit cost-and-lifetime incentive stated in the '632 Background itself.
• The single element I could not find in pre-2014 art is E/F's specific mechanic — a per-ESU degradation model whose output is ΔSOC, compared to an SOC-change threshold, with allocation held under that threshold. That is the element a defendant must find a teaching of, and the element the patentee should be expected to defend on.
• Recommended verification before relying on any ground: (a) pull the face-of-patent "References Cited" list and the EPO search report for EP 2987674 and the CN/JP counterparts; (b) confirm priority/filing dates for US 9,290,107 and read WO 2014/091238 A2 in full; (c) confirm whether the ISR citing JP H10-14002 / US 4,931,947 / US 2012/091964 is in this family. I could not complete these checks and have not fabricated the results.

Explicit non-findings: I did not verify the content of WO 2014/091238 A2 or US 2011/0172867 A1; I did not confirm that any listed reference appears on the face of US 9,878,632; and I did not locate the patent's own citations table. Anything in this analysis that depends on those items is flagged as unverified rather than asserted.