Rambus seems to be one of those firms that go through all life experiences at once. On the one hand, it unveiled a new patent for mobile
XDR memory and even
got $900 million for signing a license agreement with Samsung back in January. On the other hand, the licensing company is locked in a legal
battle with NVIDIA, over alleged patent infringements. To continue this string of alternating developments, Rambus has just announced that it entered a license agreement with Advanced Micro Devices.
The Los Altos, California-based licensing company owns a large number of patents dealing with logic and memory interfaces, system design and memory architectures. A number of DRAM vendors suspect that many of these patents were obtained illegally, during Rambus' participation in JEDEC. Nevertheless, regardless of such accusations (which have been mostly refuted by the FTC), many companies pay royalty fees in exchange for access to the patents.
While NVIDIA claims that its product's stay away from Rambus' patent portfolio, and meets the latter in court whenever patent infringement accusations inevitably sprout, AMD seems to be doing the exact opposite. The CPU and GPU maker's original agreement with the license owner was set to expire in September this year, but this latest pact between them extends the duration to the third quarter of 2015. During this time, in exchange for the right to use Rambus' integrated circuit and circuit board product patents, Advanced Micro Devices will pay a license fee each year, in quarterly installments.
“We are pleased with AMD’s decision to renew and look forward to further opportunities to align the interests of our companies,” said Sharon Holt, senior vice president of Licensing and Marketing at Rambus. “This agreement will continue to provide AMD customers the full benefit of licensed products using our patented innovations to enrich the consumer experience of electronic systems.”
The actual fee will be determined at the end of the ongoing year.
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