Dan3, you have it wrong.
The expenses are not a serious issue, they are temporary and they will be recovered.
The Hitachi and NEC contracts do not end in December, they are 5 year contracts. True, they don't cover products produced by a 3rd company, which, legally, the joint venture is. But not all covered products are even being transferred to the joint venture at all. Further, it now turns out, the joint venture is using Hitachi and NEC as Fabs, the manufacturing facilities are NOT being turned over to the joint venture. This is different than was originally understood, e.g. the joint venture will not do it's own manufacturing. In this scenario, it's very possible (although still an open question) that Hitachi and NEC ARE THEMSELVES still the actual MANUFACTURERS for legal purposes and, having each signed a 5-year agreement, are THEMSELVES still obligated to pay the Rambus royalties.
There will be more license agreements. When Infineon, Hyundai and Micron all lose their patent cases in Germany OR settle, which will happen very shortly (December or January for Infineon, Feb/March for MU and Hyundai), the whole memory industry will sign.
Then Rambus will go after non-memory infringers of their patents, such as AMD, Transmeta, Via and, quite possibly, Intel (I'm not suggesting that these companies will be sued, at that point it's likely they will sign without legal action -- there are already reports of non-RDRAM license negotiations with AMD and Transmeta). |
