Rambus to Attempt to Collect Royalties on Chipsets

Datafage writes "According to this article, RAMBUS is going to go after the manufacturers of all chipsets that interface with RAM, including Intel, AMD, Via, and presumably video chipset manufacturers in their relentless pursuit of royalties for their ill-gotten patents. This begs the question: Will they ever stop?"

Comments

Something's got to snap...

[electricmonk]

Do I understand this correctly in that they are taking on an entire industry? This is a do-or-die situation for Rambus now. Either they win their lawsuits, own the entire industry, gain legitimacy and generally make their stockholders cream in their pants, or they lose everything and get laughed out of business. Right now, with the state of patent law, it looks like it could go either way, where in reality, it shouldn't really be a question at all.

Even more telling is their SEC statement

[Brento]

If you read their latest earnings statement here, you'll notice something even more telling:

...no additional licenses for SDRAM-compatible ICs will be signed, that prices of RDRAMs will remain high compared to SDRAMs and that litigation and building costs will exceed the Company's plans.

They're perfectly aware that nobody else is going to license their chipsets, and they plan on suing anybody and everybody to make money.

RAMBUS must die.

[Alcoholist]

RAMBUS has a seemingly endless supply of vague patents to sue technology companies over. Every time they win a case because of stupid US patent law, they gain the confidence and precedent to continue to come up with bolder schemes to suck even more money from technology companies.

This is exactly what happens when the staff of a technology company is 50% lawyers. I suspect that this is only the beginning of a era of corporations who produce nothing, design nothing, contribute nothing, but profit from continuous litigiousness, all because of stupid US law and legal practice.

It's a huge blow to progress in general (RAMBUS RAM is a good example). Someone has to stop this kind of thing before dozens of companies are all trying the same thing, wrecking the technology market because of greed.

How did Rambus ever get these patents?

[msobkow]

In 1985/86 my 400 series VLSI design course at university involved leading and trailing clock edge triggers (rising/falling signals.) The use of both edges to effectively double performance was a standard practice, and documented in the textbooks that were printed even earlier.

The rather extreme efforts of Cray Research to balance signal paths in order to allow increased clock speed without loss of signal coherency was also studied.

I don't see anything in the Rambus patent descriptions that don't fall back to common design techniques in use over 10 years ago.

I don't get it. Why isn't Rambus in court on charges of theft or fraud? They claim ownership of design principles that are not only normal practice, but that were created over a decade before their company existed!