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(Image credit: AMD) Adeia has filed a pair of patent infringement lawsuits against AMD in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, claiming that AMD’s chips incorporate patented innovations covered by its hybrid bonding IP portfolio.
The company says ten patents are at issue — seven covering hybrid bonding and three tied to process nodes used in advanced logic and memory manufacturing. The litigation, announced November 3, follows what Adeia describes as years of failed licensing talks. AMD has not yet commented.
Hybrid bonding technology sits at the heart of AMD’s 3D V-Cache design, the feature that gives Ryzen X3D processors their gaming advantage and server-class cache density. Instead of solder bumps, it fuses copper and dielectric surfaces directly between dies, creating a near-monolithic connection at micron-scale pitch. That allows a 64MB slab of SRAM to be stacked on each Zen compute die without overwhelming its thermal or electrical limits. The technique is widely understood to use TSMC’s SoIC process family, a form of hybrid bonding that enables ultra-dense 3D integration.
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Adeia, which spun out of Xperi, claims ownership of a large portfolio of bonding and interconnect IP. Its DBI and ZiBond technologies have already been licensed to major players in memory, CMOS image sensors, and 3D NAND. The company now argues AMD’s products make “extensive use” of the same concepts, asserting that its patented work has “greatly contributed” to AMD’s success.
Hybrid bonding could be the foundation for the next phase of chip scaling, as performance gains shift from transistor density to vertical integration. AMD’s roadmap leans heavily on stacked designs, not just for Ryzen but for EPYC and future accelerators that layer compute, memory, and I/O. If Adeia’s claims survive early procedural challenges, the case could test how much of that stack belongs to the IP holder and how much to the foundry in any judgments that follow.
Few expect any near-term disruption to AMD’s products, since injunctions in patent cases of this kind are rarely granted under post-eBay v. MercExchange precedent. The more immediate question is whether Adeia’s claims can survive the early procedural hurdles that often decide the outcome long before trial.
AMD and its foundry partners are almost certain to challenge the patents through inter partes review at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, arguing that the asserted claims are either too broad or already covered by TSMC’s process IP.
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/adeia-sues-amd-over-hybrid-bonding-tech-behind-3d-v-cache#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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