The secondary defense against Rambus's claimes may be becoming clearer:
NEC is a major participant in the DDR rollout and hasn't extended its DDR agreement with Rambus beyond the end of the year so they must be expecting the Rambus SDRAM / DDR claims to lose in court. But what if Rambus wins?
Rambus receiving equitable compensation for its alleged IP would likely never have been an issue - the thing that has infuriated the industry has been the size of the Rambus demands relative to the value of the IP it was offering. Rambus is demanding 20% of the industry's profits in exchange for 0.001% of the necessary IP. But since the way the industry used to work was by cross-licensing, and Rambus (which produces nothing) didn't need to cross-license, they assumed they could blackmail the rest of the industry.
By spinning off their fabrication divisions into a new company, NEC's and Hitachi's RAM divisions now must license from everyone, but have no cross-licenses with anyone.
In the event that Rambus is actually able to make its claims stick, NEC's and Hitachi's RAM divisions will then seek to license the relevant 10 or so patents from Rambus, together with 1,000 or so patents from Micron, 1,000 or so patents from IBM, 1,000 or so patents from Intel, hundreds of patents from NEC, Hitachi, AMD, TI, etc.
The result will be a list of something like 10,000 patents. NEC/Hitachi will probably offer 2% to 5% of the selling price of the RAM devices to be allocated according to the number of patents that must be licensed from each company. The dozens of companies involved would likely be willing to settle for such an arrangement. The Rambus share would amount to something like 2 ten thousandths of the selling price of SDRAM or DDR. If Rambus tried to demand more than its equitable share, it would likely have a tough time gaining it in court. And attempts by Rambus to shut down the world's RAM industry on the basis of its miniscule share of the IP needed to manufacture RAM are unlikely to meet with success. This restructuring, after all, wouldn't be done to deny one company its due, the restructuring simply assures that all companies with included IP receive their fair share of royalties. Why would it be equitable for Rambus to receive royalties for a handful of RAM patents while Micron, IBM, Intel, etc. receive nothing for their thousands of RAM patents?
The aggravation for Micron, Samsung, Infineon, etc. is that they might also have to undergo a similar restructuring to force a similar deal. But rest assured that they will do so. If it were only a matter of paying off Rambus, the industry might just pay and move on. But if they agree to such outrageous terms with Rambus they will face dozens or hundreds of similar claims over the next few years.
The industry has no choice but to either see Rambus's claims disallowed completely, or converted into reasonable and equitable claims.
Either way, the notion that Rambus's patent on the location of a timing register is going to result in more than 10 times the revenues of TI's basic, comprehensive patents on RAM and DRAM is clearly an erroneous one.
Dan |
