CAFC Reverses Noninfringement Ruling Against Intel in Precedential VLSI Decision

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision on April 14, 2026, in VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corporation, reversing the Northern District of California’s summary judgment of noninfringement and vacating the exclusion of VLSI’s damages expert. Chief Judge Moore authored the opinion, delivering a partial win for patent owner VLSI against one of the world’s largest chipmakers.

At issue was U.S. Patent No. 8,566,836, titled “Multi-core System on Chip.” VLSI Technology asserted that various Intel processor products infringed the patent’s claims, which cover integrated multi-core processor architectures on a single chip. The Northern District of California had granted Intel’s motion for summary judgment of noninfringement and separately struck the damages theories offered by one of VLSI’s expert witnesses.

The CAFC reversed both rulings. On the noninfringement holding, the court found that the district court had committed error in its claim construction — the foundational legal analysis that defines the scope of patent rights before applying those rights to an accused product. Because the claim construction was flawed, the noninfringement determination that followed from it could not stand. The court remanded the case for further proceedings consistent with the corrected claim interpretation.

On the damages expert exclusion, the CAFC likewise found that the district court’s basis for striking the witness was legally insufficient. Damages expert testimony in patent cases is frequently the site of aggressive gatekeeping under the Daubert standard, and reversals of expert exclusions are not uncommon in the Federal Circuit. Here, the court determined that the exclusion was not warranted, and the damages theories will need to be reconsidered on remand.

The decision’s designation as a precedential opinion carries significant weight. Precedential opinions bind future panels of the CAFC and set authoritative legal standards across the court’s jurisdiction — which includes all patent appeals from U.S. district courts nationwide. The precedential status suggests the court viewed the claim construction methodology and damages expert standards as warranting clear, binding guidance for the broader patent litigation community.

VLSI Technology is a patent holding company whose portfolio derives largely from patents developed by the semiconductor division of what was once Philips Electronics, later reorganized under NXP Semiconductors. The company has pursued a series of infringement actions against Intel over the past several years. In 2021, a jury in the Western District of Texas awarded VLSI $2.18 billion in damages against Intel — one of the largest patent verdicts in U.S. history at the time, though that case involved different patents.

Intel, which maintains one of the industry’s most extensive patent portfolios, has found itself as a defendant in multiple high-profile patent actions in recent years. The remand in this case sets the stage for renewed proceedings on both infringement and damages under the CAFC’s corrected claim construction. For companies with semiconductor and SoC-related patent portfolios — whether as patent owners seeking enforcement or as accused infringers assessing risk — the CAFC’s precedential guidance on claim construction methodology is directly relevant to litigation strategy.

Full coverage of the CAFC ruling is available at IPWatchdog (April 14, 2026).