Hi Zeev Hed; Re the situation with Infineon's IP. What is going on here is the threat of blocking RDRAM production. Infineon's objective here is to threaten to stop Toshiba's or Samsung's production of RDRAM, for instance.
Does Infineon have cross licenses with Samsung? On the patents that are the subject of the Infineon suit? Neither of us know. I was unable to find a press release for such an agreement with a google search, but it is possible that I missed it. If you've got a link, put it up.
If it is the case that Samsung and Infineon both feel that the other has patents equally as strong as their own, there would be no obvious financial reason for them to formally cross license themselves. Most of the cross licensing agreements that I read about in my google search consisted of agreements between companies that had ended up in court. I don't think that Infineon ever ended up in court with Samsung (or Toshiba), and I really doubt that they have a patent cross license agreement. And if they did cross license, that agreement is valid only for a limited time.
So if there is no patent cross license agreement, or if any such agreement is due to run out, could Infineon withhold the right to make RDRAM from Samsung?
The other thing to remember is that all of this is in the context of a memory manufacturing community that hates Rambus. All these companies are definitely capable of deciding on actions that are not financially profitable for them.
The real question is would Samsung protect its right to make RDRAM as much as the memory makers who do not make RDRAM (which outnumber Samsung and Toshiba by quite a bit) want to see it stopped.
I seem to recall that Infineon and Micron did get into a patent battle, and likely have a cross license agreement.
-- Carl
P.S. There seems to be some expectations among the local community that the German court system will punish Infineon, their own company, for refusing to pay Rambus royalties on SDRAM, in what is likely to be the first legal result from the SDRAM royalty trials. This seems to me to assigning the German courts a fairness that belies the historical record. Or maybe I'm being unfair here, and the Germans really have changed... |
