NETLIST Loses Three Federal Circuit Appeals Against Micron on Same Day
The Federal Circuit affirmed PTAB rulings invalidating claims of five Netlist memory patents challenged by Micron, including one precedential decision.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on September 2, 2026 issued three separate opinions in appeals brought by Netlist (NLST) against Micron Technology (MU), affirming in each case decisions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that had held the challenged claims of Netlist's computer memory patents unpatentable. Taken together, the rulings uphold the invalidation of claims across five Netlist patents.
In appeal Nos. 2024-2240 and 2024-2241, a panel of Judges Reyna, Linn and Stark affirmed two consolidated final written decisions holding unpatentable all claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 8,787,060 and 9,318,160, which cover methods for optimizing driver load in three-dimensional stacked memory packages. Judge Stark wrote the nonprecedential opinion, which arose from inter partes reviews IPR2022-01427, IPR2022-01428, IPR2023-00882 and IPR2023-00883.
The second decision, Nos. 2024-1859 and 2024-1863, concerned U.S. Patent Nos. 11,016,918 and 11,232,054, directed to DIMMs with on-module voltage converters. The Board had found claims 1–30 of each patent obvious over combinations of the Harris publication, the JEDEC FBDIMM standards, Amidi and Hajeck. Judge Linn, writing for the panel, affirmed.
The third and precedential opinion, No. 2024-1707, was authored by Judge Reyna and affirmed the Board's determination that all challenged claims of U.S. Patent No. 10,949,339 are unpatentable as obvious over the Ellsberry and Halbert references. That patent covers memory modules using byte-wise buffers between a memory controller and DRAM devices, with data paths disabled by default.
All of the underlying inter partes reviews originated with petitions filed by Samsung Electronics or by Micron using the same prior art, with Micron joined as a petitioner. The opinions note that Samsung has since settled with Netlist and withdrawn from the appeals, leaving Micron as the sole appellee.
Netlist has built much of its business around licensing and enforcing its memory patent portfolio against large DRAM makers. The simultaneous affirmance of PTAB invalidations across five patents removes those claims as leverage in the company's ongoing disputes with Micron.
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