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Micron sues Rambus for antitrust violations
darkrot writes "According to the Micron website, Micron is suing Rambus for violations of antitrust laws, as well as asserting its non-infringement and the invalidity of Rambus' patents." So far Hitachi and Toshiba have settled with Rambus. Toshiba still makes RAMs, so its settlement with Rambus was odd in that it could only spur on Rambus to sue more people. This suit might reduce the attraction of business models based on generating patents and suing, rather than bringing products to market. Update: 08/29 07:03 PM by S :Oops: "settled with Rambus" not Micron.
The "problem" is that Rambust owns patents on SDRAM. They were part of the JEDEC committee, while at the same time patenting the core technologies being finalized. If this isn't conflict of interest, I don't know how else to define it. The biggest problem with Rambust is not that it is expensive, but that it doesn't work well. The technology is immature and flaky. Don't even think about mixing vendors on the same board. Also, it is not only the PC-800 that has problems. It is not like SDRAM, whereby faster chips run better in slower systems. There are problems across the board. It's just that Rambus isn't so popular that these problems have not come out. If you buy a Rambus-based system, buy one from a first tier vendor, or you'll be sorry.