Posted 11/28/08 at 11:01:32 AM by Paul Lilly

Earlier this year, a jury ruled that Rambus, a designer and licensor of memory chips, did not obtain patents for memory technology through fraud or anti-competitive means. The ruling essentially gave Rambus the right to continue its practice of suing anyone and everyone involved in memory production that isn't already paying the company royalties.

Among those companies are Samsung, the world's largest memory-chip maker, Hynix, the second largest memory chip producer, Micron, and Nanya. And each of them will have to defend against claims of wrongdoing as Rambus has won a pretrial ruling alleging chipmakers infringed on one claim of a patent in a case scheduled to go to trial on January 19, 2009.

According to Jeff Schreiner, an analyst at San Diego-based Capstone Investments, the ruling by U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte means that Whyte "already found one claim for Rambus that they won't have to argue." In the past, Whyte has denied Rambus' requests for similar pretrial rulings over 10 other elements of its patents. Those previous claims, which cover alleged infringement on both DDR2 and DDR3 technology, will also be argued during the January trial.

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ram, patents, legal, Memory, court, build a pc, Rambus

Posted 08/26/08 at 11:12:02 AM by Paul Lilly

Rambus, the company most known for its rampage of patent lawsuits on all things memory, may soon be better known for something else. The company announced a Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative last year, in which it set a goal of developing a future memory architecture capable of delivering a terabyte per second of memory bandwidth to a single System-on-Chip (SoC), and Rambus showed at IDF that it's getting ever closer to that goal.

On display was a DRAM emulator pushing 16Gbps, a key hurdle in making a terabyte of bandwidth possible. However, the test chips were only single channel, putting a slight damper on the display. Still, if Rambus can bring to fruition its new memory architecture, which it looks to be well on its way to doing, it could usher in a new era of high performance memory products.

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terabyte, Memory, bandwidth, Rambus

Posted 07/11/08 at 02:30:50 PM by Chris Moody

Rambus, the technology company turned responsible for RDRAM has filed suit against Nvidia claiming that they violated 17 of its memory patents. Rambus’ lawsuit alleges that at least six of Nvidia's product lines infringe the Rambus patents including chip sets, graphics processors and applications processors. They ask for an injunction that would prevent Nvidia from selling the products as well as damages.

Tom Lavelle, senior vice president and general counsel at Rambus was quoted as saying, "For more than six years, we have diligently attempted to negotiate a licensing agreement with Nvidia, but our good faith efforts have been to no avail," he adds, "We are left with no other recourse than litigation to protect and seek fair compensation for the use of our patented inventions,".

Can you smell the bull? I better get my rubber boots it’s getting thick. His own statement shows this to be an attempt to force Nvidia to cough up something to make Rambus go away and they haven't been interested. Nvidia has yet to comment on the suit.

Read on to hear more about the Patent Troll.

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nvidia, ram, Memory, Rambus, RDRAM, SDRAM, Patent Troll