Rambus Enters Lawsuit Spree Against NVIDIA and Five Others

It seems that filing lawsuits during the holiday season is starting to become a sort of tradition now that Rambus has once again called a number of companies to court, one of them being, some might say unsurprisingly, NVIDIA.

Rambus has been meeting the likes of NVIDIA, IBM and others in court for years and it seems that it is quite willing, if not outright eager, to detonate the lawsuit bomb again.

In this new action, the licensing firm claims that its Dally and Barth family of patents has been infringed by NVIDIA, Broadcom, STMicroelectronics, MediaTek, Freescale and LSI.

The Barth patents feature DDR. DDR2, DDR3, mobile DDR, LPDDR and LPDDR2, plus GDDR3 memory controllers.

The Dally includes PCI Express, certain Serial ATA, some Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), as well as DisplayPort.

As one may already be able to guess, Rambus wants, on all infringing products. an exclusion order baring the importation, sale for importation or sale after importation, at least as far as the suit filed with the ITC goes.

The rest of the actions were started with the District Court for the Northern District of California and seek an injunctive relief barring the infringement, contributory infringement and inducement to infringe the patents.

Needless to say, the company also wants to be paid monetary damages.

"We have been attempting to license these companies for some time to no avail. One of the respondents frankly told us that the only way they would get serious is if we sued them. Others pursued a strategy of delay rather than negotiate a reasonable resolution," said Harold Hughes, president and chief executive officer at Rambus.

"Rambus has invested hundreds of millions of dollars developing a portfolio of technologies that are foundational for many digital electronics. There is widespread knowledge within the industry about our patents including their use in standards-compatible products accused in these actions,” he added.

“In fairness to our shareholders and to our paying licensees, we take these steps to protect our patented innovations and pursue fair compensation for their use," Huges concluded.