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Rambus Suing Hitachi and Sega
madcat15 writes "I was reading EETimes and came across a piece discussing Rambus' lawsuit against Hitachi and Sega. This also includes an injunction on the importing of Sega's DreamCast consoles, which use a Hitachi chip. Hitachi is counter suing. Patent Warfare? " This comes on the heels of a patent infringement suit filed by Rambus against Hitachi back in January.
This action just shows how desperate Rambus is these days. They sense their chance of taking a chunk of the PC market slipping away from them and now are attacking the DRAM vendors who Rambus needs to make their chips. Talk about biting the hand that feeds them. Rambus might have only sued one company but every DRAM vendor in the world knows that it was a warning shot against all of them. The DRAM vendors have disliked Rambus's powerplay since day one. Now they must hate their guts. Buyers decide the course of DRAM technology but the DRAM vendors can decide how many of each memory type to make and what the pricing roadmap looks like now and years down the road.
Rambus's much vaunted patents have never been tested in court and many of them are pretty dubious. Let's see how desperate rambus is. In a full patent infringement trial rambus risks losing these patents. And then what are they worth? (not that they are now worth $350/share today - same kind of idiot analyst reasoning that thinks Qualcomm will collect 20 billion/year in CDMA licensing by 2010; the SEC should investigate this whole stinking mess).
The only surprising thing about this 'patent war' is that it seems to have reached the point of actual litigation.
In Japan, companies tend to patent much smaller, details and modificantion than are considered patentable in, say, the US. If you patent a new type of lightbulb, you can expect other companies to patent all sorts of minor modifications to it: your new bulb with different bases, shapes and colors (if they can show a benefit or special application), with multiple filaments, higher output, lower voltage, etc.
50+ years ago, the net effect was to allow them to (in essence) bypass international patents for the domestic market (Okay, GE has the patent on that, but we have the patent on it in green!) This would hold up in a Japanese court -- not that many companies tried to enforce their rights in Japanese courts, it was 'small fry back then'
In time, this also led to a strangling network of interlocking patents. Any big company could push you to license your patents, relse they'd threaten to enforce the myriad tiny patents they or their corporate allies (it was like politics or the schoolyard) held to paralyze you or block your use of your own patent.
Result, lots of sharing and intertwined relationships, which is, of course, how the Japanese preferred to do business, anyway.
Of course, today's geek might be horrified to see the ultimate effect: locking out the little guy. He doesn't have a ton of patents to play the Pokemon Patent Trading Game (TM) (pat pend), so he usually gets bought out, absorbed or ignored (The sea of tiny modifications effectively allow the companies to use his innovation, masked as their own). Their start-up environment is dismal.
Ask anyone who tried to open a Japanese market (or business presence) in the 70's/80's. The culture shock was like a 2x4 to the head. It felt like socially condoned fraud, theft, monopolism, -- and a lot of words I can't print here. Comparisons to the Mafia were common (behind closed doors)
Now the trend in the US seems to be to patent anything that isn't tied down, and lots of things that are. We've seen where this leads. Is it where we really want to go?
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If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
There's a LOT of stuff going on with this, and it's patent related, standards related, and all that other kinda stuff.
RMBS is suing Hitachi over -timing- techniques that RMBS has patented (think DDR type of things for an idea, IIRC). Normally, this wouldn't be -too- much of a problem (well, it would morally, but not legally), but these techniques were developed in an industry standards setting, JEDEC of which both Hitachi and RMBS were/are members.
Why is this such a problem? Because one of the things JEDEC memebrs agree to do is inform other members of pending patents, and to -not- patent technology developed in the JEDEC conferences/discussions. -THIS- is why Hitachi is counter suing, not to mention the anti-trust aspects as well. Take a look at how RMBS is licensing the technology: they require the licensing of -other- technologies from either themselves, or another outfit before the potential licensor can license the RMBS technology. This smacks of product tying in a possibly illegal manner.
Also note that killing Dreamcast off helps Intel (RMBS's heaviest investor and backer) -and- Microsoft with the XBox, by giving them only 2 competitors to try to nuke, instead of three. This is also -very- reminiscent of Intel's pending litigation with VIA...
This nonsense needs to stop, before we -really- see technological advance halt for 20 or 30 years.
Rambus is suing for infringment of the following patents:
Synchronous memory device having a programmable register and method of controlling same
The present invention includes a memory subsystem comprising at least two semiconductor devices, including at least one memory device, connected to a bus, where the bus includes a plurality of bus lines for carrying substantially all address, data and control information needed by said memory devices, where the control information includes device-select information and the bus has substantially fewer bus lines than the number of bits in a single address, and the bus carries device-select information without the need for separate device-select lines connected directly to individual devices.
Synchronous memory device
Same Abstract
Integrated circuit I/O using a high performance bus interface
Same Abstract
Synchronous memory device having an internal register
The present invention is directed to an integrated circuit device having at least one memory section including a plurality of memory cells. The device includes an internal register to store an identification value which identifies the device on a bus. The device further includes interface circuitry, coupled to the bus, to receive identification information and a read request. The interface circuitry includes a plurality of output drivers and comparison circuitry. The output drivers are coupled to the bus to output data on the bus in response to the read request. The data is output synchronously with respect to first and second external clock signals when the comparison circuitry determines the identification information corresponds to the identification value.
Part of what Rambus has patented is its self-enumerating memory scheme. (Yeah, I know; self-enumerating busses are old hat. Rambus innovated their way into the realization that memory busses could self-enumerate.) As it happens, though, SDRAM and derivatives don't self-enumerate. The USPTO full-text database is down (/.?) but if the abstract is to be believed the first three above don't apply to SDRAM.
They also patented transferring data on both clock edges (yeah, I know; IBM was doing this in the 60s, but Rambus innovated etc.) This has been in use in SRAM since before Rambus' patent app so I'm not worrying a lot.
Also not directly mentioned is that Rambus has patented programmable CAS latency (do you really want to know?) in memory devices. Since programmable CAS latency has been around in controllers since the '80s and SDRAM moved low-level controller functions to the memory this may be headed for the scrap heap; in the meantime the SDRAM manufacturers (via JEDEC) are removing the feature from their parts. Considering what this is costing them, they are not happy with Rambus.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,