Hi HH,
The short answer to your question is "I don't know". But I assume that the RMBS impact on RMTR has to be considered positive no matter the impact of the RMBS royalty demands.
RMTR buys all its Enhanced DRAM of what ever flavor from licensee's for resale. So if, say Infineon pays RMBS a royalty on those chips, I assume it will be built into the price paid by RMTR.
But I am also assuming that RMTR will do its best to pass that lug on to its OEM customers one way or another. I see very little chance that RMBS will get IP royalties from all the folks in the chain from fab to re-seller, to distributor, to OEM. When you consider the hit on controller design, CPU bus, as well memory, separate direct payments by every one in the food chain would kill the industry. ...Not simply result in the mother of all Tech Sector cash cows for lawyers.
On the other hand, the existence of RMBS and its alleged "performance" advantage, has pressured the memory Fab guys and chip set guys to come up with alternatives to the "closed system" proprietary designs that RMBS is pushing. That's an open invitation to the small fry like RMTR to rush in and fill a need.
There are only so many ways to go to get performance out of system memory in a high bandwidth, low latency environment and I am betting that RMTR has the best solution. At least for now through 2003, and quite possibly longer.
But the most relevant factor for me is that RMTR has practically NO market share to defend. For them, any and every opportunity is important. Without RMBS there to force the door open. The memory fabs could take their sweet time developing performance improvements in their high commodity, low quality chips. And the BIGGER the threat from RMBS the better as far as I am concerned.
RMTR could develop an enhanced (SRAM cache) DRAM for the Rambus as far as I am aware. If so, continued criticism of DRDRAM's performance compared to SDRAM and DDR also works in RMTR's favor. If RMBS looses in the fight over SDRAM/DDR royalties they'll have nothing left but their DRDRAM technology which suffers from latency deficiency. It may well be that at some point in the future, RMBS only salvation will be to get some design help from RMTR.
If that should ever happen the price exacted by RMTR would be quite high I would assume. Assisting RMBS would bring with it many new "enemies" RMTR doesn't need, so the help would presumably not come cheap. There isn't much chance that they could buy RMTR without paying through the nose because of all the treasury shares sitting there, unless they bought off management and paid a substantial premium.
It could happen but I would think it would be cheaper for them to just negotiate a license for the EMS on chip cache design. But all this is obviously dependant on the EMS IP being a viable solution to DRDRAM's latency problem and that is a VERY big assumption. DRDRAM may in fact be no more than the most expensive niche product ever produced.
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