Rambus ruling appealed
WITH A RUSTLE of movement in the thicket of Rambus patents litigation, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a federal appeals court decision earlier this year in favour of the memory technology design company.
The commission had accused Rambus of convincing the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) to define advanced Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) standards for memory designs without revealing that it owned patents covering those technologies.
Various types of advanced DRAM memory are used in electronic devices including all sorts of personal computers, large computer servers, video cards, storage controllers, printers and cameras.
In early 2007, the FTC determined that Rambus had gained an illegal monopoly on DRAM memory technology, ordered the company to licence its memory chipset design patents to the JEDEC member memory manufacturers that it had allegedly deceived, and capped the royalties it could charge the manufacturers.
Rambus appealed the FTC's ruling and the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against the FTC in April.
The Supreme Court probably won't announce whether or not it will hear the FTC appeal for several months. ยต
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Rambus
rumpus rejected
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The JEDEC oligopoly is not necessarily better than a RAMBUS monopoly. I hope people can keep an open mind about this sort of thing, since I'm sure there are people who are like me that do not appreciate paying RDRAM-style prices for lackluster performance and scalability of DDR2/3/etc. It's not like there isn't a demand for higher performance memories. At least give it a shot. I remember the days when there was a little upstart company called "AMD" that challenged goliath and through competition inspired innovation. RAMBUS may and may not be such a thing, but I am repeatedly disappointed when I do not see any production designs implementing the technology. After all, the bandwidth isn't the only feature worth looking into. All I ask is that people take a second look at the technology, politics aside.