US ITC Begins Formally Investigating Rambus Patent Infringement Charges

As one may have already realized, the winter holidays somehow manage to act as a sort of signal for the emergence of new lawsuits, one of which, started by Rambus against a whole set of chip makers, has begun to be formally addressed by the US ITC.

Some time ago, on December 1 to be more specific, Rambus filed patent infringement claims against multiple designers of memory chips, them being Broadcom, Freescale, LSI, Mediatek, Nvidia and STMicroelectronics.

What Rambus claims is that many of their semiconductor products that utilize DDR, DDR2, DDR3, mobile DDR, LPDDR, LPDDR2 and GDDR3 infringe the so-called Farmwald-Horowitz and Barth families of patents.

According to the ITC, a vote passed for the starting of an investigation of those many semiconductor chips and products.

The ITC even established that it was necessary to include many manufacturers, like Asustek Computer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Motorola, Seagate and HP, in the investigation.

Of course, just the fact that the investigation was started does not means that the ITC made any decisions.

One of the judges will first have to establish whether there really is a patent infringement, after which some time will be taken (45 days) to set up a target date for completing the investigation itself.

On the bright side, so to speak, the Commission is not going to look into the so-called Dally family of patents.

These patents relate to open industry standards, like Serial ATA, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), DisplayPort and PCI Express.

What this implies that that products and companies involving or using such standards don't have anything to worry about, at least not on top of everything else they have to deal with.

What remains to be seen is if any more lawsuit somehow manage to sprout up before the year is up and if Rambus gets the exclusion order barring the importation, sale for importation, or sale after importation of all infringing products.