US 7158758

I'll search for this specific patent and any related 2026 litigation.

US Patent 7,158,758 — Analyst Report

Search scope note: I searched public patent databases (Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, uspto.report) and general web sources including 2026 Federal Circuit reporting (WilmerHale, Patterson Sheridan, Gibson Dunn, Oliff, A&O Shearman) for the specific number 7158758. I found no CAFC docket or district court litigation involving this patent. That is an absence-of-evidence finding, not proof of non-litigation — 2026 docket records are not fully indexed in the sources I can reach, so treat this as uncertain.

Bibliographic Data

Abstract

A high-speed WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network) system for enabling communication between piconets is configured by at least one first device located in the child piconet. A C-PNC (Child Piconet Coordinator) device includes a C-MIB (Child Piconet Management Information Base) storing mapping information associated with devices located in the child piconet and a P-MIB (Parent Piconet Management Information Base) storing mapping information associated with devices located in a parent piconet. At least one second device is located in the parent piconet. The first device includes a C-MIB and a first B-MIB (Bridging Management Information Base), detects destination information of data using the mapping information stored in the first B-MIB to transmit data to a device located in the parent piconet, and transmits the data containing the detected information to the C-PNC device. The C-PNC device broadcasts the mapping information stored in the C-MIB and P-MIB to different piconets, and switches and transmits the data from the first device to the parent piconet. The second device includes a P-MIB and a second B-MIB, and receives the data from the C-PNC device.

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

The patent has three independent claims: claim 1 (system), claim 7 (method), and claim 10 (method). All three share the same architecture: a parent piconet (already formed) and a child piconet (newly formed using timeslots allocated by a device in the parent piconet), bridged by a C-PNC device that sits in the overlap region and maintains two information bases.

Claim 1 — The System

A WPAN system for cross-piconet communication, comprising three cooperating elements:

1. A first device in the child piconet — holds a C-MIB listing devices in its own child piconet. It also receives information about parent-piconet devices, builds from that a B-MIB (Bridging MIB), and when sending data, looks up the destination in the B-MIB and transmits the data with that destination information attached.
2. A C-PNC device in the common area between the two piconets — holds both a C-MIB and a P-MIB (the latter listing parent-piconet devices), broadcasts both sets of mapping information into the different piconets, and switches/forwards data coming from the first device onward into the parent piconet.
3. A second device in the parent piconet — holds a P-MIB, and independently builds its own B-MIB from the child-piconet information broadcast by the C-PNC device, and receives the data forwarded by the C-PNC device.

The key inventive idea: the bridging intelligence is distributed into ordinary endpoint devices (via the B-MIBs), not centralized in the coordinator alone. Information about a foreign piconet is broadcast across the piconet boundary, and each endpoint caches it in a Bridge MIB so it can address a device in the other piconet directly.

Claim 7 — Method, Child → Parent Direction

A data-transmission method on the same system architecture. Steps:

• (a) The first device (child side) looks up destination information in its first B-MIB.
• (b) The first device transmits the data based on that destination information.
• (c) The C-PNC device switches/forwards the received data into the parent piconet, meanwhile broadcasting mapping information for the first and second devices across the piconet boundary.
• The second device (parent side) then receives the data from the C-PNC device.

Essentially: child device addresses a parent device out of its Bridge MIB → C-PNC acts as the relay/switch → parent device receives.

Claim 10 — Method, Parent → Child Direction

The mirror-image method. Steps:

• (a) The second device (parent side) looks up destination information in its second B-MIB.
• (b) The second device transmits data based on that destination information.
• (c) The C-PNC device switches/forwards the data it receives from the second device into the child piconet, while broadcasting mapping information for the first and second devices across the boundary.
• (d) The first device (child side) receives the data from the C-PNC device.

Dependent Claims (context only)

• Claims 2–5: the mapping entries contain device addresses, device IDs, and piconet IDs; addresses are MAC addresses (~64 bits, claim 4 uses "about 64 bits"); device IDs are 8 bits.
• Claim 6: reverse-direction operation for the system claim (second device → first device via the C-PNC using the C-MIB).
• Claims 8–9: mirror the mapping-information contents and reverse-direction steps for the claim 7 method.
• Claim 11: reverse-direction steps (first device → second device, using the P-MIB) for the claim 10 method.

Caveats and Uncertainty Flags

• I am reporting the claim breakdown and bibliographic data from the patent text and the corroborating database records retrieved above; these are consistent with each other, so I have high confidence in them.
• No 2026 (or any) CAFC docket entry for patent 7158758 was found. I cannot confirm from authoritative sources that this patent has never been litigated, only that my searches surfaced nothing. Given the patent expired in June 2025, active 2026 infringement appeals would be unusual, though appeals from earlier-filed cases are possible.
• The Google Patents record lists the status as "Expired – Lifetime," with the adjusted expiration of 2025-06-25; the legal-status line in the source explicitly states this is an assumption and not a legal conclusion.
• Minor OCR artifacts appear in the source text (e.g., "bride-capable device" for "bridge-capable," "C-PNC" spelled elsewhere as "C PNC," "transmitts"), which I have interpreted but not altered in quoted claim language.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 7158758. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Litigation Search Results for US Patent 7,158,758

Bottom line: I found no litigation — no district court or Federal Circuit (CAFC) case, no ITC §337 investigation, and no PTAB proceeding — in which US Patent 7,158,758 is identified as a patent-in-suit.

What the patent is

US 7,158,758 B2 ("High-speed—WPAN and method for enabling communication between devices located in different piconets"), assigned to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., filed 2004‑01‑16, priority 2003‑07‑31 (KR 2003‑53261), granted 2007‑01‑02. It covers bridging between parent/child piconets using C‑MIB/P‑MIB/B‑MIB mapping information. It is now Expired – Lifetime (adjusted expiration 2025‑06‑25), which makes it an unlikely candidate for recent assertion activity.

Search coverage and why I concluded "none found"

I searched litigation-focused sources (Unified Patents litigation portal, CourtListener/RECAP, PACER-derived dockets via Docket Alarm/PacerMonitor, Justia, Google Patents) for the literal number 7158758 / 7,158,758. Results returned:

1. No case records naming US 7,158,758 as a patent-in-suit in any complaint, counterclaim, or ITC complaint.
2. Coincidental matches that are NOT this patent (I did not treat these as litigation against the '758 patent, per the rule to interpret identifiers literally):
   • JP 7158758 A — a Japanese patent/publication number (various mechanical-art search reports). A different jurisdiction and unrelated subject matter.
   • "7158758" as a Brazilian/Lithuanian/Finnish/Trademark administrative publication number — unrelated municipal/registry documents.
   • The "'875 patent" in the Roku / URC universal-remote ITC matter (Inv. 337‑TA‑1263) is a different patent about programmable remote controls — not US 7,158,758 (which concerns 802.15.3 WPAN piconet bridging). Do not conflate these.

Conclusion

Based on the sources available to me, there is no known litigation or PTAB/ITC proceeding involving US Patent 7,158,758. Consequently there are no plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome to report.

Caveat: I was unable to directly open live Unified Patents case-list or PACER queries before reaching my search limit, and no comprehensive commercial litigation database (e.g., Docket Navigator, Lex Machina) was fully searchable here. It is possible a low-profile, settled, or sealed action exists that is not surfaced by public web search. Given the patent expired in June 2025 and was a Samsung portfolio patent, any enforcement would likely have occurred years ago and would normally appear in the sources searched. I therefore state the result as "no litigation found" rather than an absolute certainty, and recommend confirming against Docket Navigator or Lex Machina if a definitive negative is required.

I'll verify the ODP-provided default against live sources before finalizing.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks to rule out any real proceeding on this specific patent.

Proceedings overview

US-patent-7158758 has zero PTAB proceedings on file — the ODP structured record returns no AIA trials, and my independent searches surfaced none; the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied, meaning there is no PTAB precedent to leverage against assertions of this patent — but also no PTAB loss to overcome, and the more consequential defense fact is that the patent's term has already run.

Proceedings

None on file

I checked the canonical source (the "PTAB proceedings on file" block, sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal) and ran live verification searches. Both agree: no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition has ever been filed against US 7,158,758.

Because there is no proceeding, there is no petitioner, no panel, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision, and no Federal Circuit appeal to report. I will not manufacture docket numbers to fill this section.

What I searched and what I ruled out (important — this patent number is a collision magnet):

Note also that US 10,715,878 is the single most likely source of a false positive here — a defendant's counsel pulling "7158758" off a demand letter or a docket sheet can easily land on the AlmondNet litigation family. Do not import any Samsung/Roku/Meta estoppel analysis or AlmondNet claim-cancellation result into a defense of this patent.

On the CBM question: this patent could not have supported a CBM review in any event. Its claims are directed to piconet bridging in an IEEE 802.15.3 UWB WPAN — not a "financial product or service" under § 18(d)(1) of the AIA. And the CBM transitional program sunsets for new petitions under the statute (no new CBM petitions since 2020-09-16), so that avenue is closed regardless.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 11 claims are UNTESTED at the PTAB. Claims 1–6 (the system claims) and claims 7–11 (the method claims) have never been challenged in an AIA trial, which means every claim stands as issued. Claim 1 is the broad system claim — a first (child-piconet) device holding a C-MIB and a first B-MIB, a C-PNC holding both a C-MIB and a P-MIB that broadcasts both to different piconets and switches data, and a second (parent-piconet) device holding a P-MIB and a second B-MIB. Claims 7 and 10 are the mirror-image method claims (child→parent and parent→child data flow), and claims 6, 9 and 11 are the reverse-direction dependent/method claims. The only narrowing in the record is prosecution-era, not PTAB-era: the "B-MIB / bridging information" architecture is the invention's stated point of novelty over the admitted prior art in FIGS. 1–4, and that same disclosure is the patent's own worst prior art for any § 103 argument.

Estoppel landscape: no § 315(e)(2) estoppel exists against anyone on this patent. Because no IPR was ever instituted, no petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is estopped from raising any ground — § 102, § 103, § 112, or best-mode — in district court or at the ITC. Conversely, there is no petitioner-side chart or FWD reasoning to borrow. Any invalidity defense must be built from scratch, and the most obvious springboard is the patent's own "Description of the Related Art": FIG. 3's P-PNC/C-PNC and FIG. 4's MIB mapping table (MAC address + device ID + piconet ID) already disclose the mapping-information scheme the claims recite, and the asserted distinction is merely populating a bridging table across piconet boundaries. That is a genuine § 103 fulcrum — but it is untested, and you would be the first to test it.

Pattern signals: none. There is no repeat petitioner (there are no petitioners), no PTAB appeal history, no Unified Patents or other defensive-aggregator involvement, and no IPR-based settlement activity. The patent's entire post-grant history is administrative: a single chain of maintenance-fee payments (4th year 2010-06-03, 8th year 2014-06-30, 12th year 2018-06-20) and a terminal "Adjusted expiration 2025-06-25" event. The absence of IPRs on a 2003-priority Samsung WPAN patent is unsurprising rather than telling — IEEE 802.15.3/UWB WPAN never achieved the commercial deployment that would have attracted third-party challenges, and by the time the IPR regime matured in 2012–2013 the patent had under a decade of term left.

The controlling defensive fact is expiration, not invalidity. The structured record states the status verbatim as "Expired - Lifetime," with an adjusted expiration of 2025-06-25 — roughly a 20-year term from the 2004-01-16 filing date plus PTA, consistent with the 2003-07-31 Korean priority (KR 2003-53261; KR100547788B1). As of today (2026-09-21), the patent has been expired for approximately 15 months. That eliminates injunctive relief and ongoing-royalty theories outright, and § 286 caps recovery at infringement occurring within six years before the complaint was filed. Any demand letter you receive today can only be a past-damages shakedown covering a window that closed on 2025-06-25.

Recommended next steps

1. Lead with the expiration date, not with invalidity. The patent's own terminal disclaimer/maximum-term adjustment puts the expiration at 2025-06-25 (ODP legal-status event, "Adjusted expiration"). Confirm the calculation against the face of the patent and the USPTO Patent Center fee/term record, then put it in the first paragraph of your response. If the demand letter cites claims 1–6 or 7–11 as a basis for a license covering future products, or threatens injunctive relief, the citation is meritless on its face — there is no enforceable term left.

2. Run the § 286 damages window. Recovery is limited to infringement within six years before filing. Work backward from the complaint/notice date to fix the earliest recoverable date, and note that everything after 2025-06-25 is non-actionable post-expiration conduct. In most modern-product accused-instrumentality scenarios, the accused products did not even exist during the recoverable window.

3. If past damages are genuinely in play, attack validity first — the deck is unshuffled. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and no FWD to reckon with, so you are free to run IPR, district-court, or ITC invalidity in parallel without estoppel consequences. Build the § 103 case on the patent's admitted prior art (FIGS. 1–4, P-MIB/C-MIB/MAC+deviceID+piconetID mapping) plus IEEE 802.15.3 draft standard contributions. Note the one non-patent citation of record: LAN/MAN Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society; Draft P802.15.3 (Feb. 17, 2003), XP002294149 — that document is both the patent's own cited reference and a strong § 102(b)/§ 103 springboard.

4. Do not file a defensive IPR. The patent is expired; the Board will not institute, and even if it did, the remedy would be worthless. Spend the budget on a district-court § 101/§ 112 or § 103 motion instead.

5. If you want a belt-and-suspenders record, check the family and docket directly. The same invention was prosecuted as EP1503549B1 (granted 2008-11-05, now lapsed/not-in-force per the UK register), JP3884748B2, and KR100547788B1. Foreign prosecution histories can supply claim-construction positions and examiner reasoning. For the US record, verify directly at USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End (PTAB E2E) and USPTO Patent Center — I could not reach PTAB E2E programmatically in this session, so treat the "zero proceedings" conclusion as verified against ODP + public web sources, not as a direct E2E query result.

Bottom line for a defendant: this is not a hardened patent and not a canceled patent — it is an expired patent with eleven wholly untested claims. You have no IPR estoppel to worry about and no FWD to attack, but you also have no free kill. If there is real money on the table for pre-2025-06-25 conduct, the fight is a clean-slate § 103 case built on the patent's own admitted prior art; if there is not, the expiration date should end the conversation.

I'll verify the assignment record and check for any assertion history before writing this up.

Let me check for any litigation or assertion history tied to this patent number.

Ownership Reconstruction — US 7158758 B2

Patent: High-speed WPAN and method for enabling communication between devices located in different piconets
App. No.: 10/759,687 · Filed: 2004-01-16 · Issued: 2007-01-02 · Priority: KR 2003-53261 (2003-07-31)
Status: Expired – Lifetime (adjusted expiration 2025-06-25)

Verification note. The USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) is a JavaScript application and could not be queried live in this session; the record below is reconstructed from the Google Patents legal-events block, which is generated from the same Assignment Center/Assignment Search data (reel/frame, execution date, recordation date, assignors, assignee). Where a field is not exposed in that mirror — specifically the correspondent of record for the one recorded assignment — I say so rather than filling it in. Everything below traces to the single reel/frame entry shown in the source.

Inventors

All six inventors conveyed to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. by the same instrument (reel 014907/0087), executed 2004-01-13 — three days before the 2004-01-16 US filing date, with the KR priority application filed 2003-07-31. This is the standard Samsung employee-inventor "executed with application" pattern (cf. contemporaneous Samsung recordings in the same era, e.g. reel 013097/0934 and reel 014817/0734, both "Executed With Application / For Inventions Made Outside U.S.A.").

Unusual patterns: none. There is no evidence of inventors departing or filing side applications; no inventor is separately named as an assignor on any later instrument. The absence of any inventor-initiated transfer is the ordinary case — not a finding.

Original assignee

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (Suwon-si / Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea), a Korean corporation — confirmed as both Original Assignee and Current Assignee on the Google Patents record.

• Primary line of business: consumer electronics and semiconductor manufacturing — the largest memory and smartphone vendor globally.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? The patent is a standards-track contribution to IEEE 802.15.3 high-speed WPAN / UWB piconet bridging. Samsung was an active 802.15.3 participant and shipped UWB/802.15.3-capable and WPAN-hosting devices in the 2005–2012 window. I cannot point to a specific Samsung SKU that was ever confirmed to practice claims 1–11, and the record does not establish commercial embodiment either way. Treat "shipped a product embodying the claims" as unconfirmed, not established.
• Current status: operating — a going concern, no bankruptcy, no acquisition, no dissolution. This is directly contrary to the fire-sale precondition that usually feeds NPE chains.

Assignment timeline

Exactly one assignment is recorded against this patent. There is no post-issuance transfer of any kind.

• 2004-01-13 (executed) / recorded 2004-01-16 — Reel 014907/0087
  • Conveyance: Assignment (recorded event text: "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST;ASSIGNORS:LIM, SE-YOUN;KWON, SEO-WON;KIM, JIN-HEE;AND OTHERS;REEL/FRAME:014907/0087")
  • Assignor: Se-Youn Lim, Seo-Won Kwon, Jin-Hee Kim, Jae-Yeon Song, Yoon-Sun Lee, Jong-Hwa Lee (all six, jointly)
  • Assignee: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Republic of Korea
  • Correspondent: not exposed in the legal-events mirror of this recording. To capture the correspondent of record (the filing attorney/firm on the cover sheet) you must open the reel 014907/0087 cover sheet directly in Assignment Center — it is not printed in the Google Patents event. I will not supply a name here, because guessing a correspondent would be fabrication. Flag: no recurrence is assessable for this chain, since n = 1.
  • Context: original inventor-to-employer assignment, executed with the application. Not a sale, not a securitization, not a transfer to an asserter.

Subsequent legal events (not assignments): 2006-12-13 patent grant; 2007-12-03 fee-payment procedure; 2010-06-03 4th-year maintenance fee; 2014-06-30 8th-year; 2018-06-20 12th-year maintenance fee paid (large entity) — the last fee event of record; 2025-06-25 adjusted expiration. All fee payments were made by the original owner. No security agreement, no merger, no change of name, no license, no release, no correction is recorded.

Family cross-check: the sibling members — EP 1503549 B1, JP 3884748 B2, KR 100547788 B1, US 2005/0026569 A1 — are likewise still held by Samsung on the face of the family record. No family member shows a transfer to a licensing vehicle.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7158758
    2003 : KR priority application filed
    2004 : Inventors assign to Samsung Electronics
         : Recorded reel 014907 frame 0087
    2007 : US 7158758 issues to Samsung
    2018 : Twelfth year maintenance fee paid
    2025 : Patent expired

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. Reel 014907/0087 is the only recorded instrument; the assignee is the operating parent itself, not an "IP / Holdings / Ventures" affiliate. No later LLC appears anywhere on the patent or its four family members.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. The assignee of record has never been Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, or any Unified Patents / RPX-listed high-frequency plaintiff. No third-party entity appears in the chain at all.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not assessable. With a single recorded assignment, recurrence cannot exist. The correspondent of record for reel 014907/0087 is not shown in the available mirror and must be read off the cover sheet in Assignment Center. Flagging this as a data gap, not a finding.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. Zero transfers in 21 years. A chain of "multiple consecutive assignments through chained LLCs in <24 months" is definitionally absent.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. I found no infringement action naming US 7158758 in district-court or ITC reporting. Samsung appears frequently as a defendant against NPEs (Maxell, Collision Communications, Wilus, Signal Point Networks, Rembrandt, Demaray), but none of those matters is tied to this patent number, and Samsung appears here only as patentee, never as plaintiff on '758. There is therefore no pre-suit assignment to time.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Samsung Electronics has not filed Chapter 7/11; this patent was never part of a distressed estate. No Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid-style auction appears.

7. Privateering — not present. No transfer to a third-party enforcement vehicle, so no proxy assertion against competitors. Nothing in Samsung's SEC filings (10-K/8-K) or in EFF / Patent Progress coverage references a transfer of this patent or of a WPAN bridging portfolio containing it.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at the original operating company.

Overriding fact: the patent expired 2025-06-25 with the 12th-year fee paid and no further fee obligations. Regardless of any signal analysis, the asset is no longer assertable.

Verdict

Insufficient data — the entire recorded record comprises only the original assignment.

Justification: the sole recorded instrument is the executed-with-application inventor-to-employer assignment to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (executed 2004-01-13, recorded 2004-01-16, reel 014907/0087), and no post-issuance assignment, security interest, merger, license, or change of name appears anywhere on the US record or on the four family members. Zero of the eight NPE signals are present on the evidence available, and no litigation naming US 7158758 was located, so the chain cannot be characterized as an NPE chain even at moderate confidence. The one residual data gap is the conventionally revealing field itself — the correspondent of record on reel 014907/0087 — which the mirror does not print; confirming that single cover sheet in Assignment Center would close the file.

Verification: USPTO Assignment Center · indexed Assignment Search — search patent number 7158758, and Google Patents legal events for US7158758B2.