The head of intellectual property at SanDisk expects NAND flash to become a bigger patent battleground, IAM reports, and the court statistics suggest the battle is already well under way.
IAM's interview with David Dutcher, the company's IP leader, describes an executive "expecting more patent cases from NPEs" and, with the flash maker independent again, free to pursue what the publication calls a "pure-play IP strategy." Translated, that means a patent portfolio built and asserted around a single product family. A standalone flash company cannot hide a dispute inside a diversified balance sheet, and it cannot subsidize a licensing standoff with disk-drive profits either. The exposure runs both ways, and Dutcher appears to know it.
Numbers back the battleground framing. IAM's own analysis of US district court filings counts DRAM disputes up 119 percent in 2025 and NAND disputes up 56 percent. Memory pricing is in a historic upcycle, royalty bases swell with revenue, and damages experts can point at the fattest quarterly lines the sector has printed. Plaintiffs read earnings reports too.
The reference case is fresh. A jury in the Western District of Texas ordered Kioxia to pay Viasat $229 million over US Patent No. 8,615,700, which TrendForce describes as covering "technology aimed at reducing power consumption while enhancing flash memory reliability and lifespan." The $229.025 million award was calculated as a running royalty through March 30, 2026, per Bloomberg reporting cited by TrendForce, and Kioxia contested both infringement and the patent's validity. IAM adds the detail that matters most here: the verdict "could give it leverage in a pending case against Sandisk." A nine-figure running royalty against one NAND maker is a settlement anchor against the next.
Litigation pressure is not confined to district court. Netlist has the US International Trade Commission investigating Samsung DRAM products, a complaint that reaches downstream to gear from Google, Nvidia, Broadcom and Super Micro, with an import ban as the requested remedy. TrendForce notes Samsung has already absorbed verdicts of $303 million in 2023 and $118 million in 2024 over Netlist patents. Naming the customers is the point; nothing concentrates a supplier's mind like its buyers receiving exclusion-order paperwork.
If Dutcher is right about the NPE wave, flash-industry legal budgets are heading the way the sector's capex already went. An IP chief who talks openly about a battleground is usually not planning to stand still on it.
Bootnote: This is SanDisk's second run as an independent company. Western Digital bought it in 2016 for roughly $19 billion and spun the flash business back out in 2025, which is why the patent portfolio now walks alone.
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