Adeia told investors on 3 August that it now expects its semiconductor licensing arm to reach $200m of annual revenue, twice the target it had carried. That arm collected roughly $26m across all of 2025. It booked $48m in the first half of this year.

Adeia is a 150-employee San Jose company, spun out of Xperi, that manufactures nothing. It owns patents and bills two very different customer sets. One is media: pay-TV distributors, streamers and consumer-electronics makers pay a fee tied to subscribers and devices. The other is semiconductors, and it is the one that has changed.

What Adeia is actually paid for

The technology is hybrid bonding — joining two silicon dies directly, copper pad to copper pad, with no solder bump between them. Below roughly a ten-micron pad pitch, nothing else works. The density gap is the whole argument: about 14,000 signal connections per square millimeter against roughly 1,500 for conventional micro-bump stacking, at three times the interconnect energy efficiency. That is why high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM sold alongside artificial-intelligence accelerators, is migrating to it. Samsung is procuring around 50 die-to-wafer hybrid bonding systems for a Pyeongtaek production line, with BESI as preferred tool supplier, applying the technique from 16-layer HBM4E before going fully hybrid at HBM5.

Adeia is positioned to tax that. A 2025 patent-influence ranking placed it first in foundational hybrid-bonding patents, ahead of TSMC, Samsung, Micron and IBM — TSMC holds more patents, Adeia the more foundational ones. Signed licensees include Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Kioxia, Sony, AMD and Nvidia. The holes are named and large: TSMC, which built its own stacking IP, and Intel, with Foveros Direct, are both unlicensed, and TSMC may simply never sign.

Underneath, the media base is eroding on purpose-built decline. Pay-TV is roughly 35-40% of revenue with subscribers falling more than 7% a year. Non-pay-TV recurring revenue grew 54% year on year in the June quarter and is now nearly double the pay-TV recurring line. Establishing the floor got harder: DISH's Chapter 11 filing on 30 June automatically stayed Adeia's April infringement suit in Colorado, and Adeia sued Fubo in Delaware on 1 July after failing to agree terms.

June-quarter revenue was $96.1m, up 12.1%. Operating margin slipped to 26.4% from 27.5% as enforcement spending — $30-35m budgeted for 2026 against roughly $7m a quarter in 2025 — absorbed the growth. Management reiterated full-year guidance of $395-435m while conceding it is pacing toward the low end. The shares fell 9% after hours on the print because revenue missed consensus by less than $1m.

The other licensor

InterDigital, a Wilmington, Delaware company that licenses cellular, Wi-Fi and video-codec patents to handset and streaming firms, gapped 16% on 30 July. Its June quarter contained $103.7m of catch-up revenue from an Amazon agreement whose final value binding arbitration will set over the next 18-24 months. Reported revenue still fell 13.4% year on year and operating margin dropped to 53.5% from 68.3%. Third-quarter guidance of $154-158m, struck on existing contracts, sits about 40% below the June quarter. Consensus has revenue falling 3.6% in 2026 and 5.3% in 2027. The recurring leg is genuinely growing — annualized recurring revenue hit a record $625.7m, up 13% — just far slower than the price. A jury trial against Disney over Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ codec use opens 8 September in the Central District of California, after InterDigital won a second pan-European injunction on 23 July.

Where the prices sit

InterDigital's enterprise value is 18.4x trailing EBITDA, up from roughly 12x in May at a $6bn market capitalization; it is now $8.5bn. Its forward price/earnings of 38.1x exceeds trailing 28.2x, the arithmetic of falling earnings. Adeia's forward 18.8x sits under trailing 23.7x, EV/EBITDA is 12.6x, and free cash flow yield 6.1%. The counterweight: at $26.78 Adeia still trades 54% above its two-year average close of $17.36. The average of ten analyst targets is $33.66.

The trend has not endorsed either story. InterDigital's 50-day average has been below its 200-day since early May, through the entire 28% month; strip its two best sessions and the month is +5.3%. Adeia is +2.2% over 30 days, and −17% without its own two best days, having fallen 10.2% in three sessions to 19 August as semiconductor shares broadly retreated. The forward moat question is dated, not rhetorical: the foundational Ziptronix bonding patent expired 4 May 2026, leaving roughly 1,100 untested continuations to carry royalties into an HBM5 ramp arriving around 2029.

The setup

Where it stands — Adeia's semiconductor royalties are inflecting while its shares sit a fifth below the high; InterDigital's re-rating rests on non-recurring money. Would confirm — Adeia's second-half semiconductor revenue exceeding the $48m booked in the first half. Would invalidate — Full-year revenue landing below the $395m floor of guidance, or semiconductor royalties stalling near $15m a quarter. Watch next — InterDigital's jury trial against Disney opens 8 September; Adeia reports the September quarter in early November. Valuation — Adeia at 18.8x forward against 23.7x trailing; InterDigital at 38.1x forward against 28.2x trailing.