Netlist Says Defeats SanDisk IPR Petitions In ULLtraDIMM Case

(RTTNews) - Netlist Inc. (NLST) announced Monday that the United States Patent and Trademark Office or USPTO denied petitions requesting Inter Partes Review or 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 or "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.

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.