Rambus will buy Cryptography Research to get its patents

PATENT HOARDER Rambus will buy the security research and development company Cryptography Research, Inc. (CRI) to acquire access to its slew of patents.

Rambus will pay $342.5m for the company, with $167.5m of that to be paid in cash, a further $50m in cash and stock paid to CRI staff over the next three years, and the remainder to be made up of 6.4 million Rambus shares.

Rambus said that the deal will give it access to CRI developments in the areas of content protection, network security, anti-counterfeiting and financial services.

CRI has licence agreements with many major technology companies, including Atmel, Infineon, Microsoft, NXP, Raytheon, Renesas, Samsung, ST Microelectronics, Toshiba and Visa.

In 2010 over five billion security products were produced using technology licensed from CRI, making this acquisition potentially very lucrative for Rambus.

Rambus has gained notoriety in the past for a number of lawsuits over alleged patent infringements. It has sued IBM, Nvidia, Broadcom, Freescale, Samsung, LSI, Mediatek, and ST Microelectronics, among many others.

Many of the lawsuits related to memory products such as DDR and GDDR, but buying CRI will give it a foot in the door of the information security industry, which might or might not bode well for the companies it sets its eyes on. Rambus has won the support of the US International Trade Commission (ITC) in many of its previous patent cases.

The CEO of Rambus, Harold Hughes said that the acquisition of CRI is part of its strategy to expand its intellectual property and "aggressively drive our revenue growth". The terminology used suggests that Rambus won't be content to just bring in money from its current licensees, but will instead hunt down potential infringers of CRI's patents.

Rambus expects the acquisition of CRI to complete this Summer and believes CRI will start to bring in money for the company as early as 2013, so we can probably expect to see it file a number of lawsuits over the next few years relating to CRI technology. µ