38 Facts About Rambus

Rambus Incorporated, founded in 1990, is an American technology company that designs, develops and licenses chip interface technologies and architectures that are used in digital electronics products.

Rambus is well known for inventing RDRAM and for its intellectual property-based litigation following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.

Rambus was founded in March, 1990 by electrical and computer engineers, Dr Mike Farmwald and Dr Mark Horowitz.

Rambus was incorporated and founded as California company in 1990 and then re-incorporated in the state of Delaware before the company went public in 1997 on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol RMBS.

Rambus's technology was based on a very high speed, chip-to-chip interface that was incorporated on dynamic random-access-memory components, processors and controllers, which achieved performance rates over ten times faster than conventional DRAMs.

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Rambus's interface was an open standard, accessible to all semiconductor companies, such as Intel.

Rambus provided companies who licensed its technology a full range of reference designs and engineering services.

Rambus purchased Cryptography Research on June 6,2011, for $342.

Today, Rambus derives the majority of its annual revenue by licensing its technologies and patents for chip interfaces to its customers.

In 2016, Rambus acquired Inphi Memory Interconnect Business, for US$90 million.

On November 2,2017, Rambus announced partnership with Interac Association and Samsung Canada to assist in enabling Samsung Pay in Canada.

Rambus would be sharing its patent portfolio, including those covering serial links and memory controllers, with NVIDIA.

In 2019, Rambus announced that it will move headquarters from Sunnyvale, California to North San Jose, California.

In 2021, Rambus announced that it started an expedited share buyback program with Deutsche Bank to buy up roughly $100 million in common stock.

Rambus acquired two companies, AnalogX and PLDA, which specialise in physical links for PCIe and CXL protocols.

In May 2022, it was announced Rambus had acquired the Montreal-headquartered electronic design company, Hardent.

Rambus developed and licensed its XDR DRAM technology, notably used in the PlayStation 3, and more recently XDR2 DRAM.

Rambus had been trying to interest memory manufacturers in licensing their proprietary memory interface, and numerous companies had signed non-disclosure agreements to view Rambus' technical data.

In 2000, Rambus began filing lawsuits against the largest memory manufacturers, claiming that they owned SDRAM and DDR technology.

Seven manufacturers, including Samsung, quickly settled with Rambus and agreed to pay royalties on SDRAM and DDR memory.

In May 2001, Rambus was found guilty of fraud for having claimed that it owned SDRAM and DDR technology, and all infringement claims against memory manufacturers were dismissed.

In January 2005, Rambus filed four more lawsuits against memory chip makers Hynix Semiconductor, Nanya Technology, Inotera Memories and Infineon Technology claiming that DDR2, GDDR2 and GDDR3 chips contain Rambus technology.

In March 2005, Rambus had its claim for patent infringements against Infineon dismissed.

Rambus was accused of shredding key documents prior to court hearings, the judge agreed and dismissed Rambus' case against Infineon.

In June 2005, Rambus sued one of its strongest proponents, Samsung, the world's largest memory manufacturer, and terminated Samsung's license.

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In February 2006, Micron Technology sued Rambus, alleging that Rambus had violated RICO and deliberately harmed Micron.

On June 20,2011, Rambus went to trial against Micron and Hynix in California, seeking as much as $12.

Rambus lost on November 16,2011, in the jury trial and its shares dropped drastically, from $14.

On November 16,2011, Rambus lost the antitrust case against Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor.

Rambus had used these patents to win infringement lawsuits against Nvidia Corp and Hewlett-Packard.

Specifically, the FTC complaint asserted that through the use of patent continuations and divisionals, Rambus pursued a strategy of expanding the scope of its patent claims to encompass the emerging SDRAM standard.

The FTC's antitrust allegations against Rambus went to trial in the summer of 2003 after the organization formally accused Rambus of anti-competitive behavior the previous June, itself the result of an investigation launched in May 2002 at the behest of the memory manufacturers.

On March 26,2008, the jury of the US District Court for the Northern District of California determined that had Rambus acted properly while a member of the standard-setting organization JEDEC during its participating in the early 1990s, finding that the memory manufacturers did not meet their burden of proving antitrust and fraud claims.

July 30,2007, the European Commission launched antitrust investigations against Rambus, taking the view that Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard.

Against this background, the Commission provisionally considered that Rambus breached the EC Treaty's rules on abuse of a dominant market position by subsequently claiming unreasonable royalties for the use of those relevant patents.

In 2013 and 2014, Rambus settled and agreed on licensing terms with several of the companies involved in long-running disputes.

On December 13,2013, Rambus entered an agreement with Micron to let the latter use some of its patents, in exchange for $280 million worth of royalties over seven years.

Rambus said these deals were part of a change in strategy to a less litigious, more collaborative approach, distancing themselves from accusations of patent trolling.