AMD hit with lawsuit over hybrid bonding tech behind potent 3D V-Cache — Adeia claims firm’s gaming chip infringes 10 of its patents

Adeia has filed a pair of patent infringement lawsuits towards AMD within the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, claiming that AMD’s chips incorporate patented improvements lined by its hybrid bonding IP portfolio.

The firm says ten patents are at problem — seven protecting hybrid bonding and three tied to course of nodes utilized in superior logic and reminiscence manufacturing. The litigation, introduced November 3, follows what Adeia describes as years of failed licensing talks. AMD has not but commented.

Hybrid bonding expertise sits on the coronary heart of AMD’s 3D V-Cache design, the function that offers 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.

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.

If the patents hold up, the case could set a new boundary between proprietary bonding methods and foundry-specific implementations, effectively defining who owns the connective tissue of 3D chip design. A negotiated settlement remains the most likely outcome, but the ruling could influence how every hybrid-bonded processor, from Ryzen to Intel’s Foveros Direct, is valued in future licensing deals.

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