Netlist Prevails Again in Patent Battles Vs. SanDisk and Smart Modular

Netlist, Inc. has prevailed against a second wave of attacks on the validity of three Netlist patents asserted against the ULLtraDIMM product from SanDisk Corp. and Diablo Technologies, Inc.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the second time, rejected concerted attempts to invalidate these fundamental patents.
 
SanDisk first requested Inter Partes Review (IPR) of these three patents in June 2014. Smart Modular filed separate petitions requesting IPR of the same patents two months later. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) denied all of these petitions in their entirety, with the last of the decisions issued March 13, 2015. The three Netlist patents are part of a patent infringement action against SanDisk and Diablo that is currently pending in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California.
 
The patents cover fundamental aspects of the high performance memory modules operating in the memory channel, particularly hybrid memory that combine the benefits of DRAM and flash. U.S. Pat. No. 8,516,185 relates to the fundamental distributed buffer architecture developed for HyperCloud, and adopted by the industry for DDR4 LRDIMM. U.S. Pat. No’s 8,301,833 and 8,516,187 arose out of NVvault, and relate to clocking and buffering techniques that are critical to the design of Non-Volatile DIMMs (NVDIMMs), such as the NVvault, ULLtraDIMM, and Netlist’s next-generation HyperVault.
 
C.K. Hong, Netlist’s CEO said: “We are very pleased that the PTAB has rejected attacks on the validity of our patents not once, but twice – a rare outcome. These seminal patents are part of a comprehensive and battle-tested IP portfolio covering high-performance memory channel products. Importantly, our inventions are not only being recognized by the USPTO but also by the industry as it moves to widely adopt Netlist’s proprietary technologies developed and patented many years ago.“
 
Fifteen petitions in total have been filed against the seven Netlist patents asserted against SanDisk and Diablo. Both parties are now barred from filing IPR petitions on the ‘185, ‘833, and ‘187 patents in the pending litigation. The PTAB did institute reviews of two Netlist patents related to self-test technologies and two patents related to load reduction. These reviews are expected to conclude later this year.   

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As well as Diablo Technologies
Diablo Technologies Comments on Motion Filed by Netlist
“Now limiting claims of lost sales to NVvault”
Diablo Technologies Sues Netlist
For unfair business practices that violate IP rights
Netlist Patent Case Against SanDisk and Diablo Technologies
Concerning ULLtraDIMM