Rambus
Encyclopedia
Rambus Incorporated founded in 1990, is a technology licensing company. The company became well known for its intellectual property
based litigation following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.
in 1997 under the code RMBS. As of February 2006, Rambus derived the majority of its annual revenue by licensing patents for chip interfaces to its customers.
Companies such as AMD
, Elpida
, Infineon
, Intel
, Matsushita
, NECEL
, Qimonda
, Renesas, Sony
, and Toshiba
have taken licenses to Rambus patents for use in their own products.
Rambus' share price has ranged between a high of nearly $150 in 2000 to a low of approximately $3 in 2002 with a 4:1 split on June 15, 2000. Rambus' share price in the first quarter of 2010 was between $20 and $24, giving the firm a market cap value of around US$2.5 billion.
debuted in 1999. They supported PC800 RDRAM, which operated at 400 MHz but presented data on both rise and fall of clock cycle resulting in effectively 800 MHz, and delivered 1600 MB/s of bandwidth
over a 16-bit bus using a 184-pin RIMM
form factor. This was significantly faster than the previous standard, PC133 SDRAM, which operated at 133 MHz and delivered 1066 MB/s of bandwidth over a 64-bit bus using a 168-pin DIMM
form factor.
Some downsides of RDRAM technology, however, included significantly increased latency, heat output, manufacturing complexity, and cost. PC800 RDRAM operated with a minimum latency of 45 ns, compared to 15 ns for PC133 SDRAM. RDRAMs can also be told to increase their latencies in order to prevent the possibility of two or more chips transmitting at the same time and causing a collision. However, SDRAM latency depends on the current state of memory so its latency can vary widely depending on what happened earlier and the strategy used by the SDRAM controller, while RDRAM latency is constant once it has been established by the memory controller. RDRAM memory chips also put out significantly more heat than SDRAM chips, necessitating heatsinks on all RIMM devices. RDRAM also includes a memory controller on each memory chip, significantly increasing manufacturing complexity compared to SDRAM, which used a single memory controller located on the northbridge
chipset. RDRAM was also two to three times the price of PC133 SDRAM due to manufacturing costs, license fees and other market factors.
With the introduction of the Intel 840 chipset, dual-channel support was added for PC800 RDRAM, doubling bandwidth to 3200 MB/s by increasing the bus width to 32-bit. This was followed in 2002 by the Intel 850E chipset, which introduced PC1066 RDRAM, increasing total dual-channel bandwidth to 4200 MB/s. Also in 2002, Intel released the E7205 chipset, which introduced dual-channel DDR support for a total bandwidth of 4200 MB/s, but at a much lower latency than competing RDRAM. In 2003, Intel released the 875P chipset, and along with it dual-channel DDR400. With a total bandwidth of 6400 MB/s, it marked the end of RDRAM as a technology with competitive performance.
Rambus also developed and licensed its XDR RAM technology.
s to view Rambus' technical data. During the later Infineon v. Rambus trial, Infineon
memos from a meeting with representatives of other manufacturers surfaced, including the line "[O]ne day all computers will be built this way, but hopefully without the royalties going to Rambus", and continuing with a strategy discussion for reducing or eliminating royalties to be paid to Rambus. As Rambus continued its participation in JEDEC, it became apparent that they were not prepared to agree to JEDEC's patent policy requiring owners of patents included in a standard to agree to license that technology under terms that are ‘reasonable and non-discriminatory’, and Rambus withdrew from the organization in 1995. Memos from Rambus at that time showed they were tailoring new patent applications to cover features of SDRAM being discussed, which were public knowledge (JEDEC meetings were not considered secret) and perfectly legal for patent owners who have patented underlying innovations, but were seen as evidence of bad faith by the jury in the first Infineon v. Rambus trial. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)
rejected this theory of bad faith in its decision overturning the fraud conviction Infineon achieved in the first trial (see below).
In 2000, Rambus began filing lawsuits against the largest memory manufacturers, claiming that they owned SDRAM and DDR technology. Seven manufacturers, including Samsung
, quickly settled with Rambus and agreed to pay royalties on SDRAM and DDR memory. In May 2001, Rambus was found guilty of fraud for having claimed that they owned SDRAM and DDR technology, and all infringement claims against memory manufacturers were dismissed. In January 2003, the CAFC overturned the fraud verdict of the jury trial in Virginia
under Judge Payne, issued a new claims construction, and remanded the case back to Virginia for re-trial on infringement. In October 2003, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Thus, the case returned to Virginia per the CAFC ruling.
In January 2005, Rambus filed four more lawsuits against memory chip makers Hynix Semiconductor, Nanya Technology, Inotera Memories and Infineon Technology claiming that DDR 2, GDDR 2 and GDDR 3 chips contain Rambus technology. In March 2005, Rambus had its claim for patent infringements against Infineon dismissed. Rambus was accused of shredding key documents prior to court hearings, the judge agreed and dismissed Rambus' case against Infineon. This sent Rambus to the settlement table with Infineon. Infineon has agreed to pay Rambus quarterly license fees of $5.9m and in return, both companies ceased all litigation against each other. The agreement runs from November 2005 to November 2007. After this date, if Rambus has enough other agreements in place, Infineon may make extra payments up to $100m. Currently, cases involving Micron and Hynix remain in court. In June 2005, Rambus also sued one of its strongest proponents, Samsung, the world's largest memory manufacturer, and terminated Samsung's license. Samsung had promoted Rambus's RDRAM and currently remains a licensee of Rambus's XDR
memory.
In May 2002, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed charges against Rambus for antitrust violations. Specifically, the FTC complaint asserted that through the use of patent continuations and divisionals, Rambus pursued a strategy of expanding the scope of its patent claims to encompass the emerging SDRAM standard. The FTC's antitrust allegations against Rambus went to trial in the summer of 2003 after the organization formally accused Rambus of anti-competitive behavior the previous June, itself the result of an investigation launched in May 2002 at the behest of the memory manufacturers. The FTC's chief administrative-law judge, Stephen J. McGuire, dismissed the antitrust claims against Rambus in 2004, saying that the memory industry had no reasonable alternatives to Rambus technology and was aware of the potential scope of Rambus patent rights, according to the company. Soon after, FTC investigators filed a brief to appeal against that ruling.
On August 2, 2006, the Federal Trade Commission overturned McGuire's ruling, stating that Rambus illegally monopolized the memory industry under section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act
, and also practiced deception that violated section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act
.
February 5, 2007, U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a ruling that limits maximum royalties that Rambus may demand from manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which was set to 0.5% for DDR SDRAM for 3 years from the date the Commission's Order is issued and then going to 0; while SDRAM's maximum royalty was set to 0.25%. The Commission claimed that halving the DDR SDRAM rate for SDRAM would reflect the fact that while DDR SDRAM utilizes four of the relevant Rambus technologies, SDRAM uses only two. In addition to collecting fees for DRAM chips, Rambus will also be able to receive 0.5% and 1.0% royalties for SDRAM and DDR SDRAM memory controllers or other non-memory chip components respectively. However, the ruling did not prohibit Rambus from collecting royalties on products based on (G)DDR2 SDRAM and other JEDEC post-DDR memory standards. Rambus has appealed the FTC Opinion/Remedy and awaits a court date for the appeal.
July 30, 2007, the European Commission launched antitrust investigations against Rambus, taking the view that Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard. This type of behaviour is known as a "patent ambush". Against this background, the Commission provisionally considered that Rambus breached the EC Treaty's rules on abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82 EC Treaty) by subsequently claiming unreasonable royalties for the use of those relevant patents. The Commission's preliminary view is that without its "patent ambush", Rambus would not have been able to charge the royalty rates it currently does.
On March 26, 2008, the jury of the U.S. District Court in San Jose determined that Rambus acted properly while a member of the standard-setting organization JEDEC during its participating in the early 1990s, finding that the memory manufacturers did not meet their burden of proving antitrust and fraud claims.
On April 22, 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
overturned the FTC reversal of McGuire's 2004 ruling, saying that the FTC had not established that Rambus had harmed the competition.
On April 29, 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a ruling vacating the order of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
, saying the case with Samsung should be dismissed, saying Judge Robert E. Payne's findings critical of Rambus, were on a case that had already been settled, and thus had no legal standing.
On January 9, 2009, a Delaware federal judge ruled that Rambus could not enforce patents against Micron Technology Inc., stating that Rambus had a "clear and convincing" show of bad faith, and ruled that Rambus' destruction of key related documents (spoliation of evidence
) nullified its right to enforce its patents against Micron.
On February 23, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the bids by the FTC to impose royalty sanctions on Rambus via anti-trust penalties.
In July 2009, the United States Patent and Trademark Office
rejected 8 claims by Rambus against Nvidia
.
On November 24, 2009, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) rejected all 17 claims in three Rambus Inc. patents that the company asserted against Nvidia Corp. in a complaint filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). However the ITC has announced that out of five patents, Nvidia did violate three of them. Due to this ruling Nvidia is facing a US import ban on some of its chips. The chips facing the US import ban are used in the nForce, Quadro, GeForce, Tesla and Tegra series graphics products, nearly every video card type manufactured by Nvidia.
On June 20, 2011, Rambus went to trial against Micron and Hynix in California, seeking as much as $12.9 billion in damages for “a secret and unlawful conspiracy to kill a revolutionary technology, make billions of dollars and hang onto power,” Rambus lawyer Bart Williams told jurors. Rambus lost on Nov 16, 2011 in the jury trial and its shares dropped drastically. Rambus fell as much as $14.04 to $4.00
On November 16, 2011, Rambus lost the antitrust case against Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor. The San Francisco County Superior Court jury ruled against Rambus in a 9-3 vote. In a statement posted on the company's website, Rambus CEO Harold Hughes said: "We are reviewing our options for appeal.".
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
based litigation following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.
History
Rambus, a California company, was incorporated in 1990 and re-incorporated in Delaware in 1997. The company was listed on NASDAQNASDAQ
The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...
in 1997 under the code RMBS. As of February 2006, Rambus derived the majority of its annual revenue by licensing patents for chip interfaces to its customers.
Companies such as AMD
Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...
, Elpida
Elpida Memory
is a corporation established in 1999 that develops, designs, manufactures and sells dynamic random-access memory products. It is also a semiconductor foundry. With headquarters in Yaesu, Chūō, Tokyo, Japan, it was formed under the name NEC Hitachi Memory in 1999 by the merger of the Hitachi, Ltd....
, Infineon
Infineon Technologies
Infineon Technologies AG is a German semiconductor manufacturer and was founded on April 1, 1999, when the semiconductor operations of the parent company Siemens AG were spun off to form a separate legal entity. , Infineon has 25,149 employees worldwide...
, Intel
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...
, Matsushita
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
, formerly known as , is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics corporation headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Japan. Its main business is in electronics manufacturing....
, NECEL
NEC
, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....
, Qimonda
Qimonda
Qimonda AG, was a memory company split out of Infineon Technologies on 1 May 2006, to form at the time the second largest DRAM company worldwide, according to the industry research firm Gartner Dataquest...
, Renesas, Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
, and Toshiba
Toshiba
is a multinational electronics and electrical equipment corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a diversified manufacturer and marketer of electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components and...
have taken licenses to Rambus patents for use in their own products.
Rambus' share price has ranged between a high of nearly $150 in 2000 to a low of approximately $3 in 2002 with a 4:1 split on June 15, 2000. Rambus' share price in the first quarter of 2010 was between $20 and $24, giving the firm a market cap value of around US$2.5 billion.
Technology
The first PC motherboards with support for RDRAMRDRAM
Direct Rambus DRAM or DRDRAM is a type of synchronous dynamic RAM. RDRAM was developed by Rambus inc., in the mid-1990s as a replacement for then-prevalent DIMM SDRAM memory architecture....
debuted in 1999. They supported PC800 RDRAM, which operated at 400 MHz but presented data on both rise and fall of clock cycle resulting in effectively 800 MHz, and delivered 1600 MB/s of bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
over a 16-bit bus using a 184-pin RIMM
RDRAM
Direct Rambus DRAM or DRDRAM is a type of synchronous dynamic RAM. RDRAM was developed by Rambus inc., in the mid-1990s as a replacement for then-prevalent DIMM SDRAM memory architecture....
form factor. This was significantly faster than the previous standard, PC133 SDRAM, which operated at 133 MHz and delivered 1066 MB/s of bandwidth over a 64-bit bus using a 168-pin DIMM
DIMM
A DIMM or dual in-line memory module, comprises a series of dynamic random-access memory integrated circuits. These modules are mounted on a printed circuit board and designed for use in personal computers, workstations and servers...
form factor.
Some downsides of RDRAM technology, however, included significantly increased latency, heat output, manufacturing complexity, and cost. PC800 RDRAM operated with a minimum latency of 45 ns, compared to 15 ns for PC133 SDRAM. RDRAMs can also be told to increase their latencies in order to prevent the possibility of two or more chips transmitting at the same time and causing a collision. However, SDRAM latency depends on the current state of memory so its latency can vary widely depending on what happened earlier and the strategy used by the SDRAM controller, while RDRAM latency is constant once it has been established by the memory controller. RDRAM memory chips also put out significantly more heat than SDRAM chips, necessitating heatsinks on all RIMM devices. RDRAM also includes a memory controller on each memory chip, significantly increasing manufacturing complexity compared to SDRAM, which used a single memory controller located on the northbridge
Northbridge (computing)
The northbridge has historically been one of the two chips in the core logic chipset on a PC motherboard, the other being the southbridge. Increasingly these functions have migrated to the CPU chip itself, beginning with memory and graphics controllers. For Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Fusion...
chipset. RDRAM was also two to three times the price of PC133 SDRAM due to manufacturing costs, license fees and other market factors.
With the introduction of the Intel 840 chipset, dual-channel support was added for PC800 RDRAM, doubling bandwidth to 3200 MB/s by increasing the bus width to 32-bit. This was followed in 2002 by the Intel 850E chipset, which introduced PC1066 RDRAM, increasing total dual-channel bandwidth to 4200 MB/s. Also in 2002, Intel released the E7205 chipset, which introduced dual-channel DDR support for a total bandwidth of 4200 MB/s, but at a much lower latency than competing RDRAM. In 2003, Intel released the 875P chipset, and along with it dual-channel DDR400. With a total bandwidth of 6400 MB/s, it marked the end of RDRAM as a technology with competitive performance.
Rambus also developed and licensed its XDR RAM technology.
Lawsuits
In the early 1990s, Rambus was invited to join the JEDEC. Rambus had been trying to interest memory manufacturers in licensing their proprietary memory interface, and numerous companies had signed non-disclosure agreementNon-disclosure agreement
A non-disclosure agreement , also known as a confidentiality agreement , confidential disclosure agreement , proprietary information agreement , or secrecy agreement, is a legal contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties...
s to view Rambus' technical data. During the later Infineon v. Rambus trial, Infineon
Infineon Technologies
Infineon Technologies AG is a German semiconductor manufacturer and was founded on April 1, 1999, when the semiconductor operations of the parent company Siemens AG were spun off to form a separate legal entity. , Infineon has 25,149 employees worldwide...
memos from a meeting with representatives of other manufacturers surfaced, including the line "[O]ne day all computers will be built this way, but hopefully without the royalties going to Rambus", and continuing with a strategy discussion for reducing or eliminating royalties to be paid to Rambus. As Rambus continued its participation in JEDEC, it became apparent that they were not prepared to agree to JEDEC's patent policy requiring owners of patents included in a standard to agree to license that technology under terms that are ‘reasonable and non-discriminatory’, and Rambus withdrew from the organization in 1995. Memos from Rambus at that time showed they were tailoring new patent applications to cover features of SDRAM being discussed, which were public knowledge (JEDEC meetings were not considered secret) and perfectly legal for patent owners who have patented underlying innovations, but were seen as evidence of bad faith by the jury in the first Infineon v. Rambus trial. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
-Vacancies and pending nominations:-List of former judges:-Chief judges:Notwithstanding the foregoing, when the court was initially created, Congress had to resolve which chief judge of the predecessor courts would become the first chief judge...
rejected this theory of bad faith in its decision overturning the fraud conviction Infineon achieved in the first trial (see below).
In 2000, Rambus began filing lawsuits against the largest memory manufacturers, claiming that they owned SDRAM and DDR technology. Seven manufacturers, including Samsung
Samsung
The Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea...
, quickly settled with Rambus and agreed to pay royalties on SDRAM and DDR memory. In May 2001, Rambus was found guilty of fraud for having claimed that they owned SDRAM and DDR technology, and all infringement claims against memory manufacturers were dismissed. In January 2003, the CAFC overturned the fraud verdict of the jury trial in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
under Judge Payne, issued a new claims construction, and remanded the case back to Virginia for re-trial on infringement. In October 2003, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Thus, the case returned to Virginia per the CAFC ruling.
In January 2005, Rambus filed four more lawsuits against memory chip makers Hynix Semiconductor, Nanya Technology, Inotera Memories and Infineon Technology claiming that DDR 2, GDDR 2 and GDDR 3 chips contain Rambus technology. In March 2005, Rambus had its claim for patent infringements against Infineon dismissed. Rambus was accused of shredding key documents prior to court hearings, the judge agreed and dismissed Rambus' case against Infineon. This sent Rambus to the settlement table with Infineon. Infineon has agreed to pay Rambus quarterly license fees of $5.9m and in return, both companies ceased all litigation against each other. The agreement runs from November 2005 to November 2007. After this date, if Rambus has enough other agreements in place, Infineon may make extra payments up to $100m. Currently, cases involving Micron and Hynix remain in court. In June 2005, Rambus also sued one of its strongest proponents, Samsung, the world's largest memory manufacturer, and terminated Samsung's license. Samsung had promoted Rambus's RDRAM and currently remains a licensee of Rambus's XDR
XDR DRAM
XDR DRAM or extreme data rate dynamic random access memory is a high-performance RAM interface and successor to the Rambus RDRAM it is based on, competing with the rival DDR2 SDRAM and GDDR4 technology. XDR was designed to be effective in small, high-bandwidth consumer systems, high-performance...
memory.
In May 2002, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed charges against Rambus for antitrust violations. Specifically, the FTC complaint asserted that through the use of patent continuations and divisionals, Rambus pursued a strategy of expanding the scope of its patent claims to encompass the emerging SDRAM standard. The FTC's antitrust allegations against Rambus went to trial in the summer of 2003 after the organization formally accused Rambus of anti-competitive behavior the previous June, itself the result of an investigation launched in May 2002 at the behest of the memory manufacturers. The FTC's chief administrative-law judge, Stephen J. McGuire, dismissed the antitrust claims against Rambus in 2004, saying that the memory industry had no reasonable alternatives to Rambus technology and was aware of the potential scope of Rambus patent rights, according to the company. Soon after, FTC investigators filed a brief to appeal against that ruling.
On August 2, 2006, the Federal Trade Commission overturned McGuire's ruling, stating that Rambus illegally monopolized the memory industry under section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act
Sherman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act requires the United States federal government to investigate and pursue trusts, companies, and organizations suspected of violating the Act. It was the first Federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies, and today still forms the basis for most antitrust litigation by...
, and also practiced deception that violated section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act
Federal Trade Commission Act
The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 started the Federal Trade Commission , a bipartisan body of five members appointed by the president of the United States for seven-year terms. This commission was authorized to issue “cease and desist” orders to large corporations to curb unfair trade...
.
February 5, 2007, U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a ruling that limits maximum royalties that Rambus may demand from manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which was set to 0.5% for DDR SDRAM for 3 years from the date the Commission's Order is issued and then going to 0; while SDRAM's maximum royalty was set to 0.25%. The Commission claimed that halving the DDR SDRAM rate for SDRAM would reflect the fact that while DDR SDRAM utilizes four of the relevant Rambus technologies, SDRAM uses only two. In addition to collecting fees for DRAM chips, Rambus will also be able to receive 0.5% and 1.0% royalties for SDRAM and DDR SDRAM memory controllers or other non-memory chip components respectively. However, the ruling did not prohibit Rambus from collecting royalties on products based on (G)DDR2 SDRAM and other JEDEC post-DDR memory standards. Rambus has appealed the FTC Opinion/Remedy and awaits a court date for the appeal.
July 30, 2007, the European Commission launched antitrust investigations against Rambus, taking the view that Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard. This type of behaviour is known as a "patent ambush". Against this background, the Commission provisionally considered that Rambus breached the EC Treaty's rules on abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82 EC Treaty) by subsequently claiming unreasonable royalties for the use of those relevant patents. The Commission's preliminary view is that without its "patent ambush", Rambus would not have been able to charge the royalty rates it currently does.
On March 26, 2008, the jury of the U.S. District Court in San Jose determined that Rambus acted properly while a member of the standard-setting organization JEDEC during its participating in the early 1990s, finding that the memory manufacturers did not meet their burden of proving antitrust and fraud claims.
On April 22, 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit known informally as the D.C. Circuit, is the federal appellate court for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Appeals from the D.C. Circuit, as with all the U.S. Courts of Appeals, are heard on a...
overturned the FTC reversal of McGuire's 2004 ruling, saying that the FTC had not established that Rambus had harmed the competition.
On April 29, 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a ruling vacating the order of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is one of two United States district courts serving the Commonwealth of Virginia...
, saying the case with Samsung should be dismissed, saying Judge Robert E. Payne's findings critical of Rambus, were on a case that had already been settled, and thus had no legal standing.
On January 9, 2009, a Delaware federal judge ruled that Rambus could not enforce patents against Micron Technology Inc., stating that Rambus had a "clear and convincing" show of bad faith, and ruled that Rambus' destruction of key related documents (spoliation of evidence
Spoliation of evidence
In law, spoliation of evidence is the intentional or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding...
) nullified its right to enforce its patents against Micron.
On February 23, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the bids by the FTC to impose royalty sanctions on Rambus via anti-trust penalties.
In July 2009, the United States Patent and Trademark Office
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification.The USPTO is based in Alexandria, Virginia,...
rejected 8 claims by Rambus against Nvidia
NVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
.
On November 24, 2009, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) rejected all 17 claims in three Rambus Inc. patents that the company asserted against Nvidia Corp. in a complaint filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). However the ITC has announced that out of five patents, Nvidia did violate three of them. Due to this ruling Nvidia is facing a US import ban on some of its chips. The chips facing the US import ban are used in the nForce, Quadro, GeForce, Tesla and Tegra series graphics products, nearly every video card type manufactured by Nvidia.
On June 20, 2011, Rambus went to trial against Micron and Hynix in California, seeking as much as $12.9 billion in damages for “a secret and unlawful conspiracy to kill a revolutionary technology, make billions of dollars and hang onto power,” Rambus lawyer Bart Williams told jurors. Rambus lost on Nov 16, 2011 in the jury trial and its shares dropped drastically. Rambus fell as much as $14.04 to $4.00
On November 16, 2011, Rambus lost the antitrust case against Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor. The San Francisco County Superior Court jury ruled against Rambus in a 9-3 vote. In a statement posted on the company's website, Rambus CEO Harold Hughes said: "We are reviewing our options for appeal.".
Management team
- Harold Hughes, Chief Executive Officer
- Dr. Mark HorowitzMark HorowitzMark A. Horowitz is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. He received his BS and MS in electrical engineering from MIT in 1978 and he completed his Ph.D in electrical engineering from Stanford University under the direction of Prof. Robert Dutton in...
, Chief Scientist - Satish Rishi, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
- Tom Lavelle, Senior Vice President and General Counsel
- Sharon Holt, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, Licensing and Marketing
- Kevin Donnelly, Senior Vice President Engineering
- Laura Stark, Senior Vice President Platform Solutions Group
- Martin Scott, Senior Vice President Engineering
- Michael Schroeder, Vice President Human Resources
- Tim Messegee, Vice President Corporate Marketing
- Eric Ries, Vice President and Managing Director, Rambus Japan