Hi all; Jack Robertson abuses basketball metaphor in report on lawsuits:
OPINION: Rambus-Infineon court battle comes to a head
Jack Robertson, EBN, April 2, 2001
It's been March Madness in the DRAM league, starting in Richmond, Va., where the Rambus Synchs have been pitted against the Infineon JEDECs in the opening round of the Final Eight patent tournament. Seven other court contests will be waged on two continents, following the Richmond shootout.
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Now, I don't profess to have Edelstone's legal acumen, but I've read every word of the disclosed Infineon documents and find them open to different interpretations. And I doubt that Infineon, now leading going into the final quarter on the basis of Judge Payne's ruling, is going to walk off the court. In fact, sources say Infineon thinks the Rambus revelation is a desperate last-minute toss and a highly debatable move.
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Rambus also claims its SDRAM IP goes back to a broad patent application filed in 1990 that was only amended by its 1997-98 claims. But the record shows that the Patents and Trademarks Office (PTO) refused to consider the original Rambus 1990 application as filed because it was considered too broad and included a number of different inventions. Rambus subsequently broke out a series of separate invention claims that were withdrawn or continued until the final 1997-98 amendments were filed and accepted by the PTO.
Rambus' contention that its SDRAM patent goes back to the frequently withdrawn and continued claims appended to the 1990 application seems to be a prima facie admission the company failed to disclose such proprietary IP to JEDEC. In fact, Rambus doesn't dispute that it failed to make such a disclosure, arguing instead that it wasn't required to.
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Industry sources say the FTC is investigating whether Rambus' nondisclosure is an antitrust violation. The FTC declines to comment on whether it is investigating a company until an official legal action is filed. Rambus sticks by its two-month-old statement that ?we have not been contacted by the FTC.?
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The celebrated Infineon documents also refer to a joint IBM-Siemens 16 and 64Mbit SDRAM development, code-named Luna, that would be produced at the partners' joint memory fab in Essones, France. Luna was always based on the open JEDEC SDRAM standard, so it appears there is nothing more sinister here than whether Infineon's JEDEC devices infringed Rambus patents.
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ebnonline.com
-- Carl |
