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Netlist, Inc.
announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
denied petitions requesting Inter Partes Review (IPR) of Netlist patents
asserted against the ULLtraDIMM. The petitions were filed by SanDisk who
partnered with Diablo Technologies, Inc., to produce the ULLtraDIMM. Both
are co-defendants in Netlist's patent infringement action pending in the
United States District Court of the Northern District of California.
In denying its petitions, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board ("PTAB") found
that SanDisk failed to establish a reasonable likelihood of showing the
unpatentability of at least one claim from the challenged patents. SanDisk
and Diablo are now barred from filing additional IPRs on the 4 Netlist
patents with claims that the PTAB refused to review. Of the five petitions
filed by SanDisk, three were denied in their entirety and a fourth was
denied as to some of the challenged claims. The PTAB granted petitions to
review three other Netlist patents that have also been asserted in the
litigation.
Noel Whitley, Netlist's Vice President of IP and Licensing said, "In court
papers filed in June 2014, SanDisk suggested that the PTAB had granted about
83% of petitions for IPR. According to statistics relied upon by SanDisk,
Netlist had just over a 3% chance of achieving this result. By any measure,
this was a highly successful outcome and speaks to the strength of our
patents in this case. Claims from these four patents represent a substantial
infringement position against the ULLtraDIMM. With the PTAB having reviewed
and rejected the defendant's arguments on invalidity, the defendants face an
uphill climb to convince a jury that the same patents are invalid,
particularly where the threshold for invalidating claims is higher in
District Court than before the PTAB."
The PTAB denied institution as to all claims of U.S. Pat. No. 8,516,185
which relates to the fundamental distributed buffer architecture created by
Netlist and is integral to the architecture of the ULLtraDIMM. Among other
functions, the distributed buffer architecture allows a proprietary DIMM
containing various types of memory to appear to the system as standard DRAM
memory. Netlist's architecture has been widely adopted by the industry on
the DDR4 LRDIMM.
Two other Netlist patents for which SanDisk's IPR petitions were denied
cover critical design features of hybrid memory modules, including
ULLtraDIMM, that employ NAND flash in the DRAM channel. U.S. Pat. No's
8,301,833 and 8,516,187 relate to clocking and buffering techniques for
moving data between the volatile and non-volatile subsystems on a hybrid
memory module, developed as part of Netlist's pioneering work on its
NVvault(TM). The PTAB also denied institution as to three claims from U.S.
Pat. No. 8,001,434 which cover self-test features that are generally
applicable to memory modules including the ULLtraDIMM.
C.K. Hong, Netlist's Chief Executive Officer said, "We are very pleased with
this outcome and the overall progress in our multi-year legal proceedings
against ULLtraDIMM and SanDisk. The technologies covered by our patents are
critical for the enterprise computing and storage space. We believe this
ruling by the PTAB is a clear validation of our IP in this area and a
testament to the years of seminal development work and ongoing investment."
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