Chuck,
RAMBUS is planning to diversify as per this article from EBN -
ebnews.com ________________
Rambus to expand beyond DRAM; names Mooring as president
By Andrew MacLellan, 12/09/99, 09:18:23 AM EDT)
Rambus Inc. today appointed long-time senior executive David Mooring as its new president, as the company strikes out in search of additional markets that demand high-speed chip-to-chip connections.
Mooring, who was formerly vice president and general manager of the Personal Computer Division at Rambus, Mountain View, Calif., will be tasked with overseeing technology development and marketing within the company's core markets.
Former president Geoff Tate will remain with the company as chief executive. Rambus today also promoted Subodh Toprani to the new position of senior vice president. Toprani, who had been vice president and general manager of the Logic Products Division at Rambus, will work with Tate to identify new business opportunities.
The company's broader focus will include the possibility of equity investments or outright acquisitions, as Rambus looks for technological challenges similar to the growing gap between CPU and main memory frequencies that propelled the development of its Direct Rambus DRAM program for the past three years.
In an interview with EBN, Tate said the move is not a departure for Rambus, but rather lies at the root of its business plan. "We're sticking to our knitting as we diversify," Tate said. "We're not doing anything different or new for us, so I think the likelihood of success should be high."
While the company declined to offer specifics, Tate said fertile areas for exploration include the network communications sector, where bottlenecks occur between various components used in line cards for LAN/WAN-based switches and routers, such as the PHY IC, network processor, ASICs, and the backplane interface. PC I/Os, the CPU's front side bus, logic-to-logic interfaces in multi-processor server environments, and virtually any area where data must be shuttled from one device to another could fall within Rambus' expanded scope.
"People have though of us as a DRAM company, and we have applied ourselves to the logic-to-memory bottleneck problem," Tate said. "But if you look at our prospectus, we have really always been a chip-to-chip connection company."
To that end, Tate said Rambus is on the lookout for technology that will help it better understand a variety of end applications and hone the interconnect expertise it's developed through its Rambus DRAM development program.
The company today will also disclose a technology road map for its Direct RDRAM memory interface, through which it will double the 800-MHz/pin data rate of existing Rambus chips in 2000. At the same time, Tate said, Rambus engineers are perfecting module-level improvements that will allow designers to increase the technology's 1.6-Gbyte/s board-level bandwidth by four times next year. Tate said the performance boost could come through the addition of multiple Rambus channels on the module, or other techniques, which he declined to specify.
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