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Kingston, a company who builds memory boards (not the IC's, they buy them from Toshiba, Hyundai, Micron, etc.), and has never had need of a legal department, is in a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems. The disagreement there is that Sun claims to have some patents regarding PC SDRAM technologies.

So basically what it is looking like, is that producers of notoriously overpriced and underperforming memory technologies (Sun and Rambus) are tired of getting kicked in the rear by cheap SDRAM and are trying to claim that since some of the patents they filed when developing these technologies involve techniques used in regular SDRAM, they deserve royalties.

They know this is going to drive up prices, and that is the real point. They are not trying to protect real IP. As for prior art, unfortunately very few people know enough about memory to understand what is truly being claimed, and even fewer have been around long enough to know the real history.

The problem with memory is that none of the circuitry is overly complicated, despite the innovations we have seen. Most of the innovation up till now, IMHO, has been on the memory controller, not the SDRAM board.

I normally don't post at my default +2, but I do so now so that the moderators can go after the trolls.