The judge in the 2009 case ordered a random cross-section of servers to be examined, which showed that Google was using technology described in the 912 patent. In 2009, Netlist officially brought forth a lawsuit. Netlist alleges that Google decided to steal the product by making it themselves or coercing other manufacturers to create copycat versions of the technology to bypass any royalties to Netlist. ![]() What they did not like and fought against was the cost Netlist wanted (per Google’s argument). Google test-drove the product, and they liked it a lot. It started when Alphabet/Google ( GOOG, GOOGL) was presented with Netlist technology in the mid-2000s under an NDA. The Netlist Legal story is complicated and lengthy. Once the lawsuits eventually finish, the company will be in a much stronger financial place regardless of the result simply by not having its expense, having new licensing revenues, and being able to sell to new massive buyers. Legal fees were just under $6 million this quarter, and because the company is suing many of the big players in the industry, only a tiny part of the market is available for them to sell to. In the last quarter, they lost $9.6 million, with the cost of the litigation being a significant drag on the bottom line. Per Netlist's last SEC filing, they had $43 million in cash and $36 million in current liabilities. Netlist, like every other computer chip company, has some risk from its exposure to China and the Taiwanese conflict. This strategy is made capable because of a state-of-the-art, wholly owned, ISO- and OSHAS-certified manufacturing and testing facilities in Suzhou, China. Netlist’s strategy is to combine its unique board-level intellectual property with a thorough understanding of semiconductor building blocks and system-level applications to deliver performance, cost, and time-to-market advantages to OEMs. HybriDIMM will be a key piece in the business after the lawsuits have finished.īecause of Netlist's commitment to innovation, the company has a broad portfolio of patents, many of which are seminal, in the areas of hybrid memory, storage class memory, rank multiplication, and load reduction, among others. HybriDIMM is the first SCM product to operate in current Intel® x86 servers without BIOS and hardware changes and the first unified DRAM-NAND solution that scales memory to terabyte storage capacities and accelerates storage to nanosecond memory speeds. Netlist continues this tradition by introducing HybriDIMM, the industry’s first Storage Class Memory product built on commodity DRAM and flash. These innovative products were built on Netlist’s early pioneering work in areas such as embedding passives into printed circuit boards to free up board real estate doubling densities via quad-rank double data rate (DDR) technology and other off-chip technology advances that result in improved performance and lower costs compared to conventional memory. Netlist was also the first to bring NAND flash to the memory channel with their NVvault® NVDIMM. This architecture was later adopted by the industry for DDR4 LRDIMM. For example, they were the first to develop the load-reduced DIMM, HyperCloud®, based on Netlist’s distributed buffer architecture. ![]() Netlist has a history of being a disruptive trailblazer. Their patented memory technologies provide superior performance and high density at a cost-efficient price, with use spanning a broad variety of markets and functions – a market that only expands as technology use grows. The company specializes in hybrid memory, combining DRAM and NAND flash raw materials to create memory solutions. Netlist, founded in 2000 and headquartered in Irvine, California, is a leading provider of high-performance modular memory subsystems to the world’s premier OEMs. Over the past two years, I have published seven previous articles on Netlist and its story, with the most recent linked here. The massive payout potential of the lawsuit has created an asymmetric opportunity and a tremendous risk-to-reward ratio. The company has a rapidly growing underlying business paired with being embroiled in what may be the largest patent infringement case in history. I maintain a strong buy rating on Netlist, Inc.
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