"Desmarais said evidence will prove that Rambus filed for patents but later filed for amendments after it discovered what direction memory standards were taking."
Below are my excerpts from Hyudai-vs-Rambus docket:
rambusite.com
pages 163, 166...
Docket-HY-072 p.163:
Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 18:32:55 -0600
To: engmgrs, exec, bdmarket
From: crisp@jupiter[.rambus.com] (Richard Crisp)
Same document, p.166
"One of the primary issues is regarding patents. The operative
assumption is that there are no patents, which Townsend of Toshiba questioned.
Rhoden asked Tabriti to cool the marketing promotion comments in his
presentation etc."
"Gordon Kelley asked whether or not any companies have patent issues
with the material. HP claims that everything is in public domain.
Sam Calvin (Intel) asked whether or not there were Rambus Patents covering
it. Wiggers claims that P1596.4 (RamLink) predates Rambus. This should be
easily confirmed or disproved."
"Townsend pointed out that when Ethernet was specified as an IEEE standard,
p.167:
that it turned out that there were patents. It appears that there is concern
that there could be similar baggage in this claim. Kelley asked whether on not
HP, Hyundai, Mitsubishi or TI had any patents covering any of this. All stated
they did not."
"Kelley asked to have us state whether or not Rambus knows of any patents
especially ones we have that may read on SynchLink. Wiggers specifically
mentioned that I have attended all of the SynchLink meetings and therefore
should know exactly what will and what will not be a Rambus patent issue."
"As I was walking out of the room after the meeting, Sam Calvin and Konrad
Lai of Intel asked me what I thought of the SynkLink Proposal. I told them
that the only major comment I had was why bother? The proposal looks far
from complete, has some serious issues regarding topology and signalling
which are unresolved and that it had no more real performance than we do
but would probably not be available for another 3 years if their experience
is similar to ours and that I felt that it would probably be. They asked
about the intellectual property issue, and I responded that my personal
opinion was that it would be virtually impossible for them to not infringe
some aspects of what we had done. I re-emphasised this was my own personal
opinion and was not to be taken a a definitive statement."
"As far as intellectual property issues go here are a few ideas:
1. DRAM on a packet oriented bus
2. DRAM with low swing signalling
3. DRAM with a two wire initialization system
4. DRAM with programmable access latency
5. DRAM with on chip address space decoding
I think it makes sense to review out current issued patents and see what we
have that may work against them. If it is something really key, then we
may want to mention it to Hyundai in our attempts to get the negotiations
underway again. If it is not a really key issue, such as the initialization
issue, then I think it makes no sense to alert them to a potential problem
thay can easily work around."
p.168:
"We may want to walk into the next JEDEC meeting and simply provide a list
of patent numbers which have issued and say "we are not lawyers, we will
pass no judgement of infringement on non-infringement, but here are our
issued patent numbers, you decide for yourselves what does and does not
infringe". On the other hand we may not want to make it easy for all to
figure out what we have especially if nothing looks really strong. If we
have a really strong one that has issued that is key to the operation of
the SLDRAM, then we may want to play that card, but again with the above
suggested disclaimer."
"..I am concerned that their open publiciting of their spec may
limit what we can claim in the area of UltraBurst.
For example, having the ability to stream new addresses
while reading data is clearly a feature of SyncLink.
This will be an interesting poker game for sure."
===========================
Pretty clear plot IMO.
COMMENT: please note that major public presentations
of "new" Rambus-D interface in 1996 were signed by
Richard Crisp, which usually means that he is the
key designer of the working Direct Rambus interface,
not just some irresponsible dude-engineer-observer. |
