Rambus suing Samsung
By UsaydEarlier this week, Rambus filed suit manufacturers it has originally filed suit against, claiming that Samsung’s SDRAM, against one of its oldest partners, Samsung, who was one of the first licensees of the company’s RDRAM. Rambus has essentially added Samsung to the list of memoryDDR RAM, GDDR2, and GDDR3 memory products violate Rambus patents. The weird part is that Samsung originally had a license from Rambus to produce these products:
Under the terms of that agreement, the company was obliged to pay Rambus royalties unless a court invalidated the patents, according to now former Rambus executives. So far, courts have generally upheld the patents.
The license was set to expire at the end of the month. Rambus did not explain why it terminated the license agreement and sued now. Ironically, Samsung was more vocal in promoting RDRAM, a type of memory designed by Rambus, than any other major memory manufacturer.
"While we have regarded Samsung as a valuable licensee of our patents for certain applications, a number of issues now exist that have made the renewal and expansion of the Samsung SDRAM/DDR license difficult," Rambus CEO Harold Hughes said in a statement.
Ironically, Samsung remains a licensee for Rambus newer XDR memory, which will be used in Sony’s PS3. It will also be interesting to see if Rambus goes after other manufacturers which use DDR and GDDR memories in their products, this could include companies such as Intel (for their chipsets), NVIDIA/ATI (the memory controllers in their GPUs) and even PC manufacturers such as Dell.
From FiringSquad