14 DAY TRIAL // Rambus lost a fight against the GPU maker back in late October, when the U.S. Patent Office decided that the former's claims that NVIDIA had violated its patents were groundless. While this development reinforced NVIDIA's confidence that it would win, Rambus was not deterred. Now, just after the latter stuffed its pockets with Samsung's $900 million, the company seems to have “evened the score” with NVIDIA as well, so to say.
“The International Trade Commission (ITC) has made an initial determination that two of the five Rambus patents at issue are invalid and unenforceable, in an action that had been brought against NVIDIA,” the firm’s press release says.
The US International Trade Commission Judge Theodore Essex ruled that NVIDIA did violate three of the plaintiff's patents. This means that certain NVIDIA products, whether chips or the devices based on them, might be banned. Such a ban would have consequences reaching even PCs manufactured by companies such as HP. Not only that, but even an import ban may be issued for products made by Palit, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, BFG, EVGA, Biostar, Pine Technology Holdings and International Diablotek.
This seems like a significant victory for Rambus but NVIDIA did state that the matter was far from reaching a conclusion. Naturally, it is to be expected that the graphics developer would push harder now that rulings seem to directly threaten its ability to conduct business. Its legal representatives said that they would be taking the patents before the commission for a full review.
"All five of the patents continue to be subject to reexamination proceedings in the Patent and Trademark Office, in which the Office has consistently found the asserted claims of all of these patents to be invalid,” said David Shannon, NVIDIA’s executive vice president and general counsel. “We will now take the patents before the full commission for a full review of the initial determination announced today."
The patents in question deal with DRAM memory and the NVIDIA memory controllers that usually come as part of processors or their supporting chipsets. Among the targets of the complaint are the nForce, Quadro, GeForce, Tesla and Tegra series.