Rambus Reels In NEC With Patent License
(09/12/00, 9:46 p.m. ET) By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
Rambus Inc. has signed 1999's second-largest DRAM maker, NEC Corp., to a now-standard intellectual-property license, compelling the NEC to pay royalties on most types of DRAM.
NEC (stock: NIPNY), Tokyo, is the second largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world as well as the fourth largest DRAM and third largest ASIC manufacturer, according to 1999 worldwide rankings compiled by Dataquest.
"NEC was quick to recognize the potential of Rambus as a technology partner, and we've achieved significant successes as a result of our close partnership," Kanji Sugihara, company president for NEC Electron Devices, the semiconductor arm of NEC Corp., said in a statement.
"We expect to see this success continue into other areas such as the PC, workstation and server markets, and the agreement signed with Rambus is another step towards that goal."
The agreement includes a licensing fee, as well as royalties that NEC will pay on SDRAM as well as the Direct RDRAM that Rambus designed and is manufactured by NEC and other firms.
As usual, the royalty rates for double-data-rate memories will be higher than those paid for RDRAM, offering the financial incentive for NEC to shift more of its production to RDRAM.
Hitachi Ltd. (stock: HIT), Toshiba Corp., and Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. have already agreed to similar licenses, and executives at Mitsubishi Electronics America have said they have been in talks over a similar license, although none has been signed.
Meanwhile, Rambus (stock: RMBS), Mountain View, Calif., said it has asked the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to investigate alleged patent infringements in imports synchronous DRAMs and double data rate (DDR) memories from Hyundai Electronics Industries Co. Ltd. , which has sued Rambus over the validity of the patents.
Micron Technology Inc. (stock: MU), Boise, Idaho, has filed a similar suit, albeit separately.
Rambus said it is seeking to stop the sale of those products in the U.S.
In a related move, Rambus said it has filed lawsuits in France and Germany against South Korea's Hyundai and Micron for alleged patent violations in SDRAM and DDR memories. |
