Mountain View, California, June 29 (Bloomberg)
Rambus Inc., a designer of high-speed computer chips, rose as much as 9.5 percent on growing optimism that its proprietary technology will become a personal-computer industry standard.
Rambus rose 5 3/4 to 96 1/4 in late morning trading after reaching 99 1/8. Its shares, which have gained about 44 percent this month, are down 13 percent from a record 109 15/16 on January 8.
Intel Corp., the world's largest semiconductor maker, is promoting Rambus technology to the computer industry. Chipmakers such as South Korea's Hyundai Electronics Co. and Siemens AG unit Infineon Technologies AG have had preliminary Rambus chips okayed by Intel, as Micron Technology Inc. said that the new technology is its most important initiative, said Mark Edelstone, a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. analyst.
''Based on recent inputs from our various industry contacts, we believe that the milestones to support the launch and long- term success of Rambus dram-based PCs are being met,'' wrote Edelstone in a report released today. He also restated his ''strong buy'' rating on the shares and a 12-month target price of $150 a share.
Market research firm Dataquest Inc. estimates that the percentage of memory chips sold based on Rambus technology will rise from 3.1 percent this year to 67 percent in 2002.
Mountain View, California-based Rambus licenses its high- speed technology to memory and microprocessor chipmakers such as NEC Corp., International Business machines Corp. and Samsung Electronics, who will pay the company royalties based on the amount of products sold.
Intel is expected to release its Rambus-based Camino chipset this September. Intel needs the chipset to boost the speed of its Pentium microprocessor chips, which run personal computers. A chipset acts as the intermediary between the microprocessor and the memory.
Jun/29/1999 11:43
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