I'm extrapolating on all industry actually, but I have a friend in a small (<100) company in ex-USSR that does exclusively patent reverse engineering for Freesc

I'm extrapolating on all industry actually, but I have a friend in a small (<100) company in ex-USSR that does exclusively patent reverse engineering for Freescale/Motorola. This one company (there are at least several others working for F/M in Czech and few other countries) does at least hundred patent researches per year for 10+ years at least, meaning buying devices by Apple, Samsung, TI, Microsoft etc. demolishing to bare crystal and then photographing layer by layer microscheme structure, restoring it on PC to reverse integral scheme and find patent infringing (and maybe a little more, some interesting tech things that wasn't known publicly, i.e. TI does very innovative tricks that are interesting for F/M). So returning to your question,no, I don't have sources, only second hand experience which I find very believable.