Memory and Storage Court Cases

How to read it

Each entry is one dispute between two companies, and each row under it is one proceeding: a lawsuit, a patent office review, an appeal or a trade complaint. A row gives the forum, the case number, the date it was filed, the patents and what happened, in order. A ruling that only one side reported is attributed to that side.

Patent fights rarely stay in one courtroom. A patent owner sues for infringement, the accused company asks the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to cancel the patents through inter partes review (IPR), and both tracks can end at the Federal Circuit. The Netlist entry shows why a jury number is not the end of a case. A jury awarded Netlist $445 million on May 23, 2024, but the PTAB had found claim 16 of the larger patent, the only claim of it asserted, unpatentable on April 17, 2024. Micron’s own filing says an affirmance of that decision would block enforcement of the verdict.

Netlist v. Micron

Netlist’s suits accused Micron’s non-volatile DIMMs, load-reduced DIMMs (LRDIMMs), other memory modules, HBM and DRAM products.

The $445 million verdict

The case that went to trial was filed in the Eastern District of Texas on August 1, 2022 as 2:22-cv-00294, first over the ’912 patent and then also the ’417 and ’215 patents. The jury found that Micron should pay $425 million for the ’912 patent and $20 million for the ’417 patent. The court entered final judgment on July 11, 2024 and denied Micron’s motions for judgment as a matter of law and a new trial on June 11, 2025. Micron appealed on July 9, 2025.

The patent office went the other way. The PTAB found claim 16 of the ’912 patent unpatentable on April 17, 2024, and all challenged claims of the ’417 and ’215 patents on July 30, 2024. Netlist appealed all three decisions, and its March 2026 10-Q lists the ’912 appeal as pending.

The other cases

Netlist’s first suits against Micron were filed in the Western District of Texas on April 28, 2021, over four patents, and have been stayed since May 11, 2022 while the PTAB reviewed them. A second Eastern District of Texas case, filed June 10, 2022 over six patents, has been stayed since February 10, 2024 for the same reason. The PTAB found all challenged claims of those six unpatentable between October 2023 and April 2024, and the Federal Circuit affirmed the ’506 decision on December 9, 2025. Netlist won one review outright, since the PTAB found no challenged claim of the ’314 patent unpatentable and the Federal Circuit affirmed that on February 20, 2026.

Micron answered in Idaho. It filed three suits in Idaho state court claiming bad-faith patent assertion under Idaho law, starting December 11, 2023, and the first was set for trial on December 7, 2026. Netlist’s 2025 suits in Texas over the ’087 and ’366 patents were moved to the District of Delaware in March and April 2026, where Micron had already asked the court to declare that it does not infringe. In 2026 Netlist added a Delaware counterclaim over HBM, a new complaint over DIMMs and a complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission seeking an order barring imports of Micron DRAM products, and the commission opened an investigation on September 23, 2026.

In Germany, the Federal Patent Court declared both of the European patents Netlist asserted in Düsseldorf invalid, and Netlist appealed. Micron says the appeals court upheld the first ruling on May 21, 2026.

The settlement

On October 5, 2026 the two companies agreed to dismiss all litigation claims against one another under settlement and license agreements. Netlist gave Micron a five-year, worldwide, non-exclusive license to its entire patent portfolio, which Netlist’s release says includes patents covering server DIMMs and HBM. Micron pays $30 million a quarter from the fourth quarter of 2026 through the third quarter of 2031, $600 million over the term, and bought 10 million Netlist shares for $1 million. The license fees add up to more than the jury’s award, paid on a schedule instead of after appeals that the PTAB rulings had put in doubt.

What it will not tell you

It does not show a court order ending any row. Micron’s 10-K says the two companies agreed to dismiss all litigation claims against one another, and Netlist’s 8-K says the agreement releases the pending proceedings “identified therein” without listing them, so each row keeps the status the last filing gave it until a court record shows the dismissal.

Each row was read from the companies’ SEC filings on November 9, 2026, not from the dockets themselves, and the board is rechecked when either company files a 10-Q or 10-K. A case joins the board when it is a patent or trade case between companies that make memory or storage, or that license patents on them, and a court or one of the parties has published a record of it.