Irvine’s Broadcom Corp. said Monday it filed a lawsuit in federal court in Santa Ana against one-time acquisition target Emulex Corp. for alleged patent infringement.
Broadcom contends that Emulex infringed on 10 of its patents for chips related to high-speed networking and data storage technologies, the company said in a statement.
The suit covers technologies that brought the Irvine chipmaker and the Costa Mesa-based maker of electronics for data storage networks head to head earlier this year in a hostile takeover battle that lasted for months.
In July, the battle ended with Broadcom dropping its bid to acquire Emulex after directors rejected its upped $912 million buyout offer from late June.
The moves ended a public takeover drama that started with Broadcom’s April offer of $764 million, which Emulex rejected on several occasions.
To some, the lawsuit will give the appearance of Broadcom going after an emerging rival for a slice of the converged networking market, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, which is seen taking hold with corporations in a couple of years.
After the takeover drama died down, Broadcom was left to figure out how to address the emerging market that buying Emulex would have provided entry to.
Emulex has claimed several design wins for converged network adapters, including one with storage industry heavyweight IBM Corp.
“As we developed our plans for the Fibre Channel over Ethernet market, we discovered that Emulex is infringing multiple Broadcom patents in an effort to use Broadcom technology to compete against both our existing and future products,” said David Rosmann, Broadcom’s vice president for intellectual property litigation. “We believe Emulex is infringing a broad range of Broadcom patents; we are concerned that Emulex’s infringement is pervasive.”
Broadcom said it’s seeking damages and an injunction against Emulex.
Emulex said it’s reviewing the patents associated with Broadcom’s complaint, but declined to comment beyond that.
Emulex has “a policy of vigorously defending the company against assertions of this kind,” the company said in a statement.
