Benjamin W. Hattenbach

One summer years ago, Hattenbach was working on intellectual property transaction matters when a lawyer asked him if he knew anything about how semiconductors are made.

He said no, except for a mention in one engineering class he’d taken. That was enough to put him on a team headed to trial two months later. “I haven’t looked back,” he said.

Now, the design and manufacturing of semiconductors comprises much of his patent litigation practice, including lately a number of cases against Intel Corp.

A standout among those was the $2.175 billion verdict he won a year ago against the chipmaker for infringing two patents owned by client VLSI Technology LLC. The patents covered improvements to microprocessors that Intel uses in many of its chips.

“The damages per processor were not all that remarkable,” Hattenbach said. “What was remarkable was the number of them [Intel was] manufacturing and selling in the United States.” The total amounted to the second-largest patent award in U.S. history. VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corp., 6:21-cv-00057 (W.D. Tex., filed April 11, 2019).

The trial was delayed a week by a terrible ice storm. Hattenbach, who likes to vacation in the arctic, enjoyed it. “You could walk down the middle of the street, which was actually the safest place to walk because of the ice,” he said.

That case was one of several VLSI brought against Intel in Delaware, California and Texas. One of those, also seeking $2 billion, was scheduled to begin trial in Austin this month.

In September, Hattenbach will try a case about three patents in certain Wi-Fi chips that are built into internet routers, Android phones and other devices. He represents NXP USA Inc., the Texas subsidiary of a Dutch semiconductor maker. It is one of many companies litigating against Taiwanese semiconductor fabricator MediaTek. NXP USA Inc. v. MediaTek Inc., 2:21-cv-0318 (E.D. Tex., filed Aug. 24, 2021).

He is representing an inventor and his next-generation battery company in a set of lawsuits over patents describing a process of “magnetron sputtering” to apply metal atoms evenly on semiconductor layers. Demaray LLC v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., 6:20-cv-00636 (W.D. Tex., filed July 14, 2020). A companion suit is against Intel.

And he is suing Intel in Delaware for a University of Maryland professor who alleges the company infringes his patents related to what Hattenbach called “fundamental microprocessor architecture” for hybrid serial and parallel computing systems. They claim Intel uses them “as the basis for most of the fundamental architecture underlying its current microprocessors” sold around the world. XMTT Inc. v. Intel Corp., 1:18-cv-01810 (D. Del., filed Nov. 16, 2018). The case is currently stayed.

Hattenbach said his early foray into transactional matters has been beneficial for his litigation practice, so he still works on some when he can. “I like the variety and breadth of being able to do a little bit of transactional work when I have some downtime.”

– Don DeBenedictis