Consumer Electronics Company Reduces Royalties, Secures Long-Term Agreement
“The claim charts produced by Chipworks contributed to our success. One in particular hit the mark and showed our partner that we were to be taken seriously.”
- Senior Litigation Executive
Situation
A large consumer electronics company faced an upcoming licensing renewal with a major semiconductor player, who it relied on to help deliver leading edge products. While the company wished to preserve its long standing business relationship, it also realized an opportunity to reduce royalty payments. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, the company required substantial evidence to strengthen its negotiating position. The company had worked with Chipworks in the past on several other successful licensing campaigns. The company approached Chipworks again because it could apply intimate knowledge of the patent portfolio to generate infringement evidence in a short time period.
Challenges
- Identify patents that would have the highest likelihood of infringement, and identify devices with highest revenue impact
- Document evidence of use based on custom analyses that the firm was not able to perform in-house
- Produce evidence to substantiate claims under tight time constraints
Chipworks Solution
- Utilized our inventory of teardown analysis to identify high revenue target devices
- Reviewed a few hundred patents, and selected applicable ones based on prior experience in supporting them and suggestions made by the company
- Performed custom structural and process reverse engineering analyses
- Produced over 10 claim charts in less than 3 months
Results
- The company was able to utilize Chipworks’ intimate knowledge of the patent portfolio to generate claim charts in a short period of time
- The company was able to negotiate a long-term licensing agreement with lower royalties
- The company realized a return of 100x its investment with Chipworks