Intellectual Ventures continues to ink deals with big technology companies, gobbling up patents and helping some of the industry stalwarts defend themselves if litigation were to arise. Today, Intellectual Ventures announced a licensing deal with Micron Technology, the Boise maker of flash memory and semiconductor technologies.

As part of the deal, Micron gains access to Intellectual Ventures’ portfolio of more than 30,000 patents. In addition, the two companies said that they can buy patents from one another.

Rod Lewis, vice president of legal affairs and general counsel at Micron, said that the deal provides “strategic access” to the IV patent portfolio. It will “help drive future innovation and continued expansion of our award-winning products and leading-edge technologies in addition to opportunities to advance our intellectual property strategies,” he added.

The agreement follows a patent licensing deal between Intellectual Ventures and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry device. Other companies that have partnered with Intellectual Ventures include SAP, HTC, Samsung Electronics and a number of universities.

Intellectual Ventures often gets labeled a “patent troll” for its strategy of gobbling up and licensing patents. Last December, the Nathan Myhrvold-led firm took its first legal action when it filed three separate lawsuits against nine companies.

In fact, some of the suits were directly tied to the areas where Micron specializes, including dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and Flash memory. In those areas, Intellectual Ventures sued Elpida Memory and Hynix Semiconductor.

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