John F. Hayden is a Principal in the Washington, DC, office of Fish & Richardson. He is the Patent Practice Group Leader for the firm, and he serves on the Management Committee. His practice emphasizes client counseling, patent prosecution, due diligence and freedom-to-operate analysis, and patent-related opinion work. Mr. Hayden’s technical focus is with electrical, computer-related, and mechanical inventions. He has extensive experience with semiconductor devices and fabrication processes (with an emphasis on semiconductor display technologies), computer hardware and software, and electrical and power equipment. Mr. Hayden has successfully prosecuted software patents in areas including methods of doing business, speech recognition and processing, computer games, communications, simulations, and image processing. He is also experienced with other technologies, such as processor structures and architectures, communications techniques, including asynchronous transfer mode, Ethernet and industrial protocols, fault tolerant computing, networking switches and routers, electronics, power equipment, lighting equipment, detection and inspection systems, automotive systems and components, sensors, optics, toys and games, medical devices, and mechanical designs.

Mr. Hayden has prior engineering experience as a cooperative engineer working in microprocessor design for Digital Equipment Corporation, Hudson, MA (1986-1988) and considerable experience doing freelance database programming and design (1984-1992).