More on the "Chombaa" trial... Rambus has not been ruled against... only their request to shut down MU production of memory chips... Thanks to kerry_lass from YAHOO...
05/25 03:45
Micron Says Italian Court Allows Production of Chips (Update1)
By Alan Patterson
Monza, Italy, May 25 (Bloomberg) -- Micron Technology Inc. said an Italian court has
ruled against a Rambus Inc. request for Micron to halt production of memory chips on the
grounds of patent infringement against Rambus' high-speed chip designs.
``The court in Monza, Italy, rejected Rambus' request for an injunction against our
factory,'' said Sean Mahoney, a corporate media relations official with Micron in Idaho.
``We were not infringing on their patents.''
Micron makes synchronous dynamic random access memory, or SDRAM, chips at a
factory it acquired from Texas Instruments Inc. in Avezzano, Italy. Rambus, a designer of
high-speed memory chips, sought a court order to halt Micron's production of the
semiconductors, which it said violated its patents.
Micron didn't disclose how much it stood to lose if chip production were halted. Losses
from closing an entire chip plant typically cost a manufacturer millions of dollars per day.
Rambus officials said they were unaware of whether the Italian court has ruled on the
issue.
``We haven't gotten an official report on the outcome yet,'' said David Mooring, president
of Rambus. ``We won't know until tomorrow.'' Rambus will appeal if it loses the case, he
said.
The company has designed the only memory chips that work with Intel Corp.'s latest
computer processor, the Pentium 4. Rambus says that its patents cover the so-called
Rambus DRAMs and other types of memory chips.
The chip designer has filed patent-violation charges against Micron in the U.S., claiming
that Micron violated its patents for SDRAM and double-data rate, or DDR, memory
chips.
Rambus has also charged Hynix Semiconductor Inc. of Korea and Infineon Technologies
AG of Germany with patent violation. Micron, Hynix and Infineon account for more than
half of the world's memory-chip production.
quote.bloomberg.com
ght_tech&T=markets_bfgcgi_content99.ht&s2=ad_right1_technology&bt=ad_position1_t
echnology&middle=ad_frame2_technology&s=AOw4NpRYhTWljcm9u |
