Hi Jdaasoc; I did notice that NEC, Toshiba and Hitachi have all agreed to pay royalties on SDRAM/DDR controllers.
However, I am unaware of any DDR memory controllers by any of those three companies either now, or being designed. Perhaps I missed one, though I like to think I keep reasonable track of DDR design wins. So I think that any royalties from them would be SDRAM only.
In addition, I believe that neither NEC, Toshiba, nor Hitachi currently sell any SDRAM (or DDR) chipsets for PCs, nor do they have any announced plans, but I could be wrong about this. I think that they sell entirely into the embedded CPU market. I've been watching for DDR design embedded design wins, and believe me, if I see one, I'll post it here, but I haven't seen any. Probably the reason for this is that embedded computers are tending to use embedded DRAM right now. I would expect that royalties from embedded SDRAM controllers would decline, more or less to zero, over the next 5 years or so. This is why these companies are pushing their embedded technologies so hard. I have no doubt that the license agreements with Rambus cover nothing in the embedded area.
I am also unaware of the details of the royalty agreements. Rambus has a history of only talking about the up side in their press releases. You have to read their PR with a careful eye. They are a company of lawyers, not engineers, and you have to read their PR as carefully as you would read a Clinton statement. Because of this, I don't know how to interpret some of their PR. Just what is the royalty on SDRAM controllers from NEC &c., and how much will it mean per year? I don't know. They undoubtedly have solid business reasons for keeping these agreements secret.
-- Carl |
