14 DAY TRIAL // Rambus is an American IP company that has been superficially categorized by many as a patent troll, but as we reported here, the firm is hard at work developing some of the world’s most impressive technologies.
In 2000, Rambus entered a fight with most of the memory manufacturing companies in the world, claiming they were infringing on its patents and were also conspiring on marginalizing its technologies to drive it out of business.
The reality is that Rambus was actually a member of JEDEC, a memory standard consortium, and then left the group.
When the company started pursuing the memory manufacturers in court, it seemed that they were claiming rights for patents developed while they were part of the JEDEC group, which was actually not the case.
This is the third case Rambus wins against companies like Micron, Nanya and Hynix, now called SK Hynix.
For those that know the technicalities of the matter, it is clear that the company is really a good technology firm and that it has actually been under serious attack from the DRAM cartel back in the day.
Actually, Rambus is famous for the XDR technology that’s inside the PlayStation 3, and many other companies such as AMD and Intel have license agreements with the IP company.
Some have associated the less impressive performance of the initial “Willamette” Pentium 4 with Rambus memory, but the reality is that Intel was, in fact, the one to blame.
Actually, Intel was sued several times for advertising Pentium 4 as superior to Pentium III when the reality was quite the opposite.
The low performance of Rambus-endowed computer systems was closely related to Intel’s Pentium 4 and it was not a DRAM matter, but people got the wrong idea that the company with the hot, expensive and low-performing technology was suing everybody else.
The technology was hot at the time, but it was performing very well and the high price was the result of a price fixing action from the big DRAM players.
