In September Mosaid bought Core Wireless Licensing S.a.r.l., a Luxembourg company that holds a portfolio of 400 patent families, consisting of approximately 2,000 wireless patents and patent applications originally filed by Nokia. Mosaid estimated that revenues from licencing them will exceed the $1 billion in revenue it has pulled in since forming in 1975.

Both WiLAN and Mosaid regularly go to court to enforce their licences. Most recently Mosaid filed suit in Delaware against Adobe Systems, Inc., Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc., IBM Corporation, Juniper Networks, Inc., NetApp, Inc., Red Hat, Inc. and VMware, Inc., alleging the seven had infringed its networking patents.

When WiLAN made its initial pitch for Mosaid it said the takeover would create "a strong, licensing champion with the global scope, scale and expertise to compete more effectively in more global technology markets with a combined total of more than 4,200 patents. "The combined company will have access to capital that will provide greater capacity to grow the business and demonstrate that the combined company has significant resources to enforce its patents through litigation if necessary," it said in a statement.

On the other hand, it admitted it wouldn't be able to keep all of Mosaid's staff, predicting "synergies" of between $5 million and $10 million a year.

Mosaid's board unanimously rejected WiLAN's initial offer at the beginning of September, calling it "clearly inadequate and highly opportunistic." On Oct. 19th, WiLAN blinked and raised its offer.