Patriot Scientific Corporation

Patriot Scientific Corporation

Type	Public (OTCQB: PTSC)
Industry	Patent monetization
Founded	1992
Founder	Woody Norris
Headquarters	Carlsbad, California, United States
Key people	Cliff Flowers (Interim CEO)^[1] Helmut Falk, Jr. (Director) Gloria Felcyn (Director) Carlton M. Johnson (Director) Donald E. Schrock (Director)
Website	www.ptsc.com

Patriot Scientific Corporation refers to itself an "Intellectual Property (IP) licensing company." Founded in 1992, it is a Delaware corporation based in Carlsbad, California and is one of the publicly traded companies started by inventor Elwood "Woody" Norris. Its stock currently trades over-the-counter on the OTCBB under the ticker symbol "PTSC."

Patriot was never successful in selling any of the technology or products it developed itself, but realized in 2004 that the acquisition of Nanotronics Corporation from Helmut Falk (Sr.) made years earlier may have given it patent rights to fundamental microprocessor technology. Its income in the last few years has come from licensing fees and settlements of patent infringement claims. It became notable in the world of penny stocks by issuing two shareholder dividends to distribute licensing/settlement income.

History

Patriot Scientific Corporation was founded in 1992 by Woody Norris as the successor to Patriot Financial Corporation, a Colorado corporation, incorporated on June 10, 1987. In 1994, Patriot purchased the assets of nanoTronics, which included the basic architecture of Patriot's microprocessors as well as the patents that are today known as the MMP portfolio. The company further strengthened its intellectual property assets by acquiring networking and communication device manufacturer Metacomp, Inc. in 1997. Patriot entered into a joint venture agreement with Technology Properties Limited, Inc. (“TPL”) in 2005 to focus on monetizing the assets in the MMP portfolio. Around the same time, the company ceased its own research and development operations. The company moved its headquarters from San Diego, CA to Carlsbad, CA in 2006.

Microprocessor Products

IGNITE Ia and IIf microprocessors from the early 2000s

The IGNITE was Patriot's attempt to bring its own microprocessor design to market. Initially marketed as ShBoom Box and later as PSC 1000, the processor was finally renamed IGNITE in the early 2000s. Notably, the IGNITE architecture was not a register machine, but used a stack computation model, which is the foundation of programming languages like Java and Forth. Originally it was designed as a fast execution platform for Forth, but with the advent of Java in the mid-1990s Patriot shifted its focus to efficiently running Java bytecode.

MMP licensees

Patriot's licensing success is a result of a joint-venture formed in June, 2005, with the TPL Group. Alliacense, a TPL entity, manages the commercialization of this jointly owned "Moore Microprocessor patent portfolio (MMP)."

Licensees include:

External links

Official web site
Alliacense web site
Company and financial information on Yahoo Finance
"Patents owned by Patriot Scientific Corporation". US Patent & Trademark Office.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 2/19/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.