Judge Tigar Construes Eleven Terms in Five Patents Concurrent Ventures and Xtream Edge Assert Against AMD and Pensando, Rejecting Every Indefiniteness Challenge.

The case

Plaintiffs Concurrent Ventures, LLC and Xtream Edge, Inc. sued Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. and Pensando Systems, Inc. for patent infringement in the Western District of Texas on March 29, 2024. The case was transferred to the Northern District of California on November 3, 2025, and is now Concurrent Ventures, LLC v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., No. 4:25-cv-09567-JST, before Judge Jon S. Tigar. The order says the five asserted patents broadly aim to increase the efficiency of communications between CPUs and other network components.

The patents

The order lists U.S. Patent No. 8,924,596, which relates to dividing and synchronizing a processing task across multiple processing elements in hardware; U.S. Patent No. 9,529,767, which relates to abstracting SATA and/or SAS storage media devices through a full duplex queued command interface; U.S. Patent No. 10,873,753, a platform for data flow processing; U.S. Patent No. 10,985,943, a programmable device for data flow processing in a user configurable server with swappable pods or cards; and U.S. Patent No. 10,944,634, a method for network connection optimization.

The '596 patent: hardware queues and registers

Claims 1, 7, and 13 of the '596 patent recite an input queue and an output queue "implemented in hardware." The defendants proposed limiting the term to queues implemented in physical circuits without software intervention. The court adopted the plain and ordinary meaning, "which does not exclude software intervention," and found the term not indefinite. It reasoned that the claims recite stored instructions, executed by a second processing element, that read a reservation register and issue commands to the input queue, and that the specification describes embodiments in which software directs hardware to issue commands. It cited Sequoia Tech., LLC v. Dell, Inc. for the rule that a construction excluding a preferred embodiment is rarely correct. For "register," the court rejected the defendants' proposal of a "set of flip-flops that store a set of related bits," noting the word flip-flop appears nowhere in the patent or its prosecution history, and gave the term its plain and ordinary meaning, adding that no further construction is needed because the parties agree the claimed register must be implemented in hardware.

The '767 patent: abstraction protocol and storage interface

Claims 1 and 16 of the '767 patent recite controllers that communicate via an "abstraction protocol" comprising "a full-duplex protocol supporting full command queuing for the at least one storage media device." The court agreed with the defendants that the claims describe the protocol by its function, but held that a skilled artisan would understand the term to name a class of simplified protocols, so 35 U.S.C. 112(f) does not apply, and that the term is not indefinite. For "storage media device interface," the court rejected limits requiring a physical interface that transmits commands and data between the edge controller and the storage device, and construed the term as "an interface that communicates with the storage media device."

The '753, '943, and '634 patents

The court construed "interleaved memory" in claims 4, 7, and 15 of the '753 patent as "an arrangement of different types of memory alternately accessed to achieve an average access bandwidth," and "swapped memory over a specified address range" as "memory where information has been moved between memory and disk for a specified range of memory addresses." It construed "one or more swappable pods or cards" and "the plurality of swappable pods or cards" as "one or more pods or cards that are removable, insertable, or replaceable," and held that construction does not render the claims indefinite. In claims 1 and 10 of the '943 patent, "programmable logic device" means "an integrated circuit with user-programmable electronic circuitry"; the court held the device must be an integrated circuit but declined to require that users be able to alter the connection pattern of the circuits. For the '634 patent, "geographical area," "network connected device," and "transmission bandwidth" take their plain and ordinary meaning, and "network connected device" is not indefinite.

Inventor testimony and next dates

The court denied the defendants' motion for leave to file a chart of the inventor's deposition testimony and deposition excerpts. Quoting Akamai Techs., Inc. v. Cable & Wireless Internet Servs., Inc., it said what the patentee subjectively intended his claims to mean is largely irrelevant to their objective meaning, and added that the evidence would not change its analysis of any term. It also granted the defendants' oral motion to construe an eleventh term even though the district's Patent Local Rule 4-3(c) allows ten. A case management conference is set for November 20, 2026, with an updated joint statement due November 13, 2026.