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BusinessWeek Examines the Rambus Legal Saga
An anonymous reader writes "Now that three companies have admitted to colluding to fix DRAM prices in what has turned out to be a global conspiracy BusinessWeek takes a look at the why. The most recent to admit guilt was Samsung and no one, as yet, knows precisely why they did it. The short answer seems to be because they didn't want Rambus' memory technology, DR-DRAM to succeed in the market. The more complicated answer is that now that Samsung, Infineon and Hynix have all admitted to fixing prices, they're now lawsuits from Rambus alleging that their motivation was to "kill Rambus" by making it too expensive for it to be attractive for PC manufacturers. Today in San Francisco, lawyers for Rambus are going to argue for the release of a set of documents currently under seal, that they think could go a long way toward proving their case. If nothing else, the timing of the price-fixing, which ran from 1999 to mid-2002 is suspicious, because that was about the same time that the DRAM companies would have been resisting pressure to adopt Rambus."
Rambus hasn't been playing by the rules either. They've been penalized for destroying documents, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050302-4664 .html
and are suing Samsung immediately after revoking their liscence.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5734443.html
It seems as if the entire industry is corrupt.
Someone save me from this sanity.
There still is a US DRAM manufacturer. Micron is still alive and kicking (and has been continuously in business since 1978), selling to consumers via the Crucial brand. There was price-fixing (which Micron doesn't seem to be completely innocent of, either), but one thing to keep in mind is that RDRAM, even if it weren't patented, required approximately 5-7 extra mask steps to create, as compared to DDR DRAM. In the cut-throat world of DRAM manufacturing, where every penny counts, this is a deal-breaker. Samsung was able to make money off RDRAM only because it was so expensive. Was it illegal for these companies to team up and kick down RDRAM? Yes. Am I sad to see it go? No way.