Adeia announced on November 3 that it has filed a pair of patent infringement lawsuits against AMD in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. The company says AMD’s chips incorporate innovations from its hybrid bonding intellectual property portfolio and that years of licensing discussions failed to produce an agreement. AMD has not yet commented on the filings.
Adeia says ten patents are at issue: seven that cover hybrid bonding methods and three tied to process nodes used in advanced logic and memory manufacturing. The firm, which spun out of Xperi, asserts ownership of a broad bonding and interconnect portfolio and notes that its DBI and ZiBond technologies have been licensed to major players in memory, CMOS image sensors, and 3D NAND. Adeia argues AMD’s products make “extensive use” of the same concepts and that its patented work has “greatly contributed” to AMD’s success.
The company links its claims directly to the hybrid bonding techniques that underlie AMD’s 3D V-Cache design, which the article describes as central to the gaming advantages of Ryzen X3D processors and to server-class cache density. Hybrid bonding fuses copper and dielectric surfaces between dies instead of using solder bumps, creating near-monolithic micron-scale connections that enable dense vertical SRAM stacking on Zen compute dies. The technique is widely understood to use TSMC’s SoIC process family, a form of hybrid bonding that supports ultra-dense 3D integration.
If Adeia’s claims survive early procedural challenges, the case could test how patent rights over bonding methods interact with foundry process IP and the rights of integrators. The article notes few expect immediate product disruption because injunctions in such patent cases are rarely granted under post-eBay v. MercExchange precedent. AMD and its foundry partners are likely to seek inter partes review at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, arguing the asserted claims are too broad or anticipated by foundry process IP, and a negotiated settlement remains a possible outcome.
