Two developments involving memory patents unfolded in quick succession in the United States in mid-July 2026. On July 16, a jury at the US District Court for the Western District of Texas found that Kioxia infringed a Viasat flash memory patent, awarding damages of approximately $229 million. The day before, the US International Trade Commission (USITC) launched a Section 337 investigation targeting seven companies, including Samsung Electronics, based on a complaint filed by Netlist.
The two cases share no parties or patents. The Kioxia case is a federal district court lawsuit over NAND flash error correction, litigating monetary damages for past infringement. The Netlist case is an ITC proceeding concerning HBM and DDR5 DIMMs, centered on a petition seeking to halt imports into the United States. What the two cases have in common is that control and implementation technologies one step above the memory cell itself can affect the sale and import of both memory products and the systems that incorporate them.
What Claim 16 Covers in NAND
Viasat's US Patent No. 8,615,700 covers "forward error correction with parallel error detection for flash memories." Viasat, a satellite communications equipment maker, and NAND flash may seem worlds apart, but the connection lies in error correction—technology for delivering data without corruption. According to Reuters, Viasat explains that while designing error correction for satellite systems, it developed technology that improves flash memory reliability.
In flash memory, bit errors increase with rewriting and aging. To address this, redundancy is added to data before it is written, and errors are detected and corrected upon reading. Claim 15 of the '700 patent describes a system comprising an encoder, flash memory, and a decoder. The decoder treats encoded data as multiple data streams, checks them in parallel using multiple error detection submodules, and passes error information to physically separated correction modules.
Claim 16, which remained at issue through trial in the district court, adds one condition to this configuration: adaptively changing the coding rate based on the flash memory's "age" or the error rate of decoded data. Lowering the coding rate increases the ratio of redundant information relative to the actual stored data. While this involves a tradeoff with capacity and processing load, it allows for stronger error correction as the memory degrades.
The technology at issue before the jury was not NAND cell materials, layer counts, or manufacturing processes. Rather, it concerned the path by which the controller encodes data, checks it in parallel, and adjusts the strength of protection according to the condition of the medium. Because this directly affects the reliability and lifespan of the finished flash device, manufacturers responsible for cell fabrication can also become defendants in infringement suits.
A Jury Verdict That Returned After Patent Office Review
Viasat sued Kioxia in November 2021 in the Waco Division of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas. Kioxia denied infringement and also challenged the patent's validity. In parallel, an inter partes review (IPR) was filed with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the US Patent and Trademark Office, resulting in some claims being invalidated. Because the validity of the remaining claims was also contested, proceedings at the district court, the patent office, and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit became intertwined.
On October 15, 2024, Viasat narrowed its infringement allegations in the district court to Claim 16 alone. On October 17, roughly two weeks before the scheduled trial, the district court stayed the case pending the outcome of the IPR appeal. In December 2025, the Federal Circuit upheld the PTAB's decision not to invalidate the remaining claims, including Claim 16. The prior art Kioxia presented was found not to satisfy the court's adopted meaning of "decode."
This background shows that the July 16 verdict was not an abrupt, out-of-nowhere massive damages award. Although Kioxia succeeded in reducing the number of claims through the patent office proceedings, Claim 16—which underpinned the infringement allegations against the products—survived. After the stay was lifted, the jury in the district court found infringement and awarded damages of approximately $229 million.
At this stage, this is only a jury verdict; it does not represent a final district court judgment or the conclusion of any appeal. Post-verdict motions on legal issues, a final judgment including the damages amount, and an appeal to the Federal Circuit may all follow. What is clear at this point is only that the jury found infringement and assessed damages of approximately $229 million. According to Reuters, Viasat is also pursuing a separate flash memory patent lawsuit against Western Digital.
Two Parallel ITC Investigations Target Samsung
Among Netlist's actions against Samsung, Investigation No. 337-TA-1511, launched on July 15, marks the second ITC investigation. The earlier Investigation No. 337-TA-1472, launched in December 2025, remains pending before an administrative law judge (ALJ). Both investigations cover DDR5-generation DIMMs, HBM, and servers and computing systems incorporating them, but the legal basis and respondents differ between the two.
| First Investigation (337-TA-1472) | Second Investigation (337-TA-1511) | |
|---|---|---|
| Investigation launched | December 29, 2025 | July 15, 2026 |
| Patents at issue | 6 other patents | Nos. 12,646,537 and 12,650,937 |
| Respondents | 3 Samsung entities, Google, Super Micro | The above plus NVIDIA and Broadcom (7 companies total) |
| Products at issue | DDR5 DIMMs, HBM, and systems incorporating them | DDR5 DIMMs, HBM, and systems incorporating them |
| Relief sought | Limited exclusion order, cease and desist order | Limited exclusion order, cease and desist order |
In the first investigation, an evidentiary hearing is scheduled for November 23 through December 3, 2026, with the ALJ's initial determination set for May 3, 2027, and the Commission's target date for completing the investigation set for September 3 of that year. In the second investigation, the USITC will set a target date within 45 days of initiation. Even where the products at issue overlap, each proceeding requires separate claim construction, litigation of infringement and validity, and proof of a domestic industry requirement.
NVIDIA and Broadcom, added as respondents in the second investigation, occupy a different position in the supply chain than Samsung, which manufactures HBM and DDR5 under its own brand. The USITC's notice listed not only the DRAM devices and components at issue but also servers, computing systems, and storage systems containing them as products at issue. Netlist has thus expanded the range of respondents from memory manufacturers to system designers, placing the import pathway for finished products squarely within the scope of the investigation.
Two Freshly Issued Patents Covering HBM Stacking and DDR5 Modules
The two patents at issue in the second investigation were issued just before the complaint was filed. US Patent No. 12,646,537 issued on June 2, 2026, and No. 12,650,937 issued on June 9, 2026; Netlist filed its complaint with the ITC on June 16. That is just 14 days and 7 days, respectively, from issuance to filing. Rather than being treated as supplementary material for the existing investigation, the speed with which a new investigation was launched based on newly issued patents stands out.
Patent No. 12,646,537 describes a memory package in which multiple DRAM array dies are stacked and connected to a control die via through-silicon vias (TSVs). Claim 1 discloses a configuration in which TSV connections are divided into multiple groups, with signals from the control die simultaneously driving each group. As stacking increases, the load on signal driving grows correspondingly, making the division of connections and control relevant to speed, power, and signal quality. Netlist asserts that this patent corresponds to HBM.
Patent No. 12,650,937 concerns the signal interface of memory modules. Its core feature is a configuration that provides separate signal interfaces for different operations via open-drain outputs. Netlist states that this covers DDR5 Registered DIMMs (RDIMMs) and Multiplexed Rank DIMMs (MRDIMMs). This patent does not concern connections within a stacked die, but rather the boundary at which server memory modules exchange control information with the host side.
Regarding these two patents, Netlist also sued Samsung and Google in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas around the same time it filed the ITC complaint—an apparent parallel strategy of seeking import relief at the ITC while seeking monetary damages in district court. Netlist has previously disclosed to the SEC that it obtained jury verdicts against Samsung in district court litigation of $303 million in 2023 and $118 million in 2024. However, appeals, IPRs, and post-verdict motions are ongoing, so these amounts are not final or collected.
The Conditions Under Which an Import Ban Would Reach AI Servers
Section 337 investigations at the ITC differ from federal district court litigation in the relief available. The USITC does not award monetary damages. If it finds a violation, it can issue a limited exclusion order barring designated respondents' products at the US border, or a cease and desist order halting activities such as sales from US inventory. Because exclusion orders are enforced by US Customs and Border Protection, they serve as powerful leverage in the import-dependent semiconductor industry.
However, the initiation of an investigation is not a finding of infringement. Netlist must show that the products at issue satisfy the patent claims, that the patents are valid and enforceable, and that a domestic industry related to the protected technology exists. Samsung and the other respondents can contest non-infringement or invalidity. Even after a violation is found, the USITC considers public health as well as effects on US competitive conditions, domestic production, and consumers. The specific wording of any order and any exemptions would also shape the real-world impact.
Whether the effects spill over into AI servers depends on how this scope of relief is designed. The products at issue listed in the notice include HBM and DDR5 DIMMs as well as the finished systems that incorporate them. Even if infringement is found, it does not necessarily follow that every product containing the memory component would be halted uniformly. The scope would be defined based on the correspondence between the patent claims and the imported products, each respondent's degree of involvement, the feasibility of switching to non-infringing products, and considerations of the public interest.
What these two cases underscore is that competition in memory is no longer decided solely by nominal bit density or bandwidth figures. In the Kioxia case, control logic that adjusts the strength of error correction according to age led to a verdict exceeding $200 million. In the Netlist case, HBM's stacked interconnects and DDR5 module signal control have become the entry point for an import investigation encompassing GPUs, servers, and storage. The next turning points will be the final judgment and any appeal in the Kioxia case, the hearing scheduled for November 2026 in the first ITC investigation, and the timeline and product scope that take shape in the second investigation.