Rambus and Renesas Electronics Sign Five Year Patent License Agreement

Rambus just announced today that it had renewed its patent license agreement with Renesas Electronics Corporation, enabling the Japanese company to use Rambus patented innovations in a broad range of its logic integrated circuits.

Hailed as the next big thing in computer memory back in 1999, in the Pentium III days, when Intel intended for RDRAM to become the de facto memory standard, Rambus had to give up on its dream when faced with opposition from the cheaper and almost as fast DDR standard.

Although this was a tough pill to swallow, the company managed to survive thanks to its impressive number of US patents.

These were the base for a vast number of lawsuits filed by Rambus against a large list of manufacturers and technology companies, the Los Altos, California-based business being particularly well known for its aggressive intellectual property based litigation practices following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.

This is due in large part to the fact that, after the RDRAM downfall, most of Rambus' revenues came from licensing patents.

Companies such as AMD, Elpida, Infineon, Intel, Matsushita, Qimonda, Sony, and Toshiba have all taken licenses to use Rambus patents in their own products.

NEC Electronics Corporation as well as Renesas Technology Corp. were also on that list, the two companies merging in April 2010 to form Renesas Electronics.

“This license with a global leader of the semiconductor industry represents continued validation of the strength of our patent portfolio,” said Sharon Holt, senior vice president and general manager of the Semiconductor Business Group at Rambus.

“We have enjoyed a long and positive relationship with Renesas Electronics, and we are pleased to renew this important agreement with one of the top five semiconductor companies.”

Unfortunately, no other details regarding the specific terms of the agreement are available, since they are qualified as confidential.

However, most companies, license patents for chip interfaces from Rambus, this probably being the case with Renesas as well.

According to the Rambus press release, this newly-inked deal spans five years.