RMBS--Micron sues Rambus, says patents invalid
By Stephanie Miles
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
August 29, 2000, 8:00 a.m. PT
Memory-chip maker Micron Technology has filed a lawsuit against Rambus, making Micron one of the first companies to resist Rambus' efforts to collect royalties on some of the most popular PC memory technologies.
Micron filed the suit yesterday in U.S. District Court in Delaware, accusing Mountain View, Calif.-based Rambus of enforcing patents that are invalid. Micron further asserts that it has not infringed any Rambus patents, declaring them unenforceable.
The suit asserts violations of the federal antitrust laws and also asserts invalidity, noninfringement and nonenforceability of Rambus patents pursuant to a number of different bases," Micron said in a statement. Company representatives were not available for additional comment.
Rambus could not immediately be reached for comment. In the past year the company has aggressively pursued litigation to protect patents filed in April 1990 that it believes give it a legitimate claim to royalty payments for some of the most widely used PC memory technologies.
Rambus' primary business has been licensing a technology for its own next-generation PC memory, RDRAM. However, in the past year, the company has sued memory makers such as Hitachi and Toshiba, asserting that Rambus' patents entitle it to royalties on competing memory technologies, including Double Data Rate (DDR) memory and synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM), the standard form of memory used in millions of PCs.
Toshiba and Hitachi settled the suits, agreeing to pay royalties for SDRAM and DDR chips as well as for RDRAM. Rambus also has a lawsuit pending against Siemens spinoff Infineon to collect royalty payments.
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter analyst Mark Edelstone has estimated that total royalties for Rambus could reach $1 billion if the company ends up receiving a 1 percent to 2 percent commission on all memory produced. |
