That patent seems like a thin hook to hang a conspiracy theory off of. It looks like a run-of-the-mill "optimize placement of stuff in a slightly different way than other people have done" patent, of which there are at least hundreds yearly.
um, "optimize placement of stuff in a slightly different way than other people have done" and save billions of dollars over the span of time, due to very high price of silicon wafers?
Most likely not; it's just another minor process variation, like the thousands of such patents that exist. Is there evidence that this patent is a particularly novel or important one?
And furthermore, what motive would someone have to knock off the inventors when they no longer even own the patent? If you look in the document, you can see that it has an single Assignee, Freescale Semiconductor. When a patent has been "assigned", the original inventors give up any proprietary rights in the invention to the Assignee, which is the normal process with corporate patents.
