Rambus and Micron Meet in Court
Trial date could be set next week, as latest in a line of patent-infringement battles lands before a judge.
Douglas F. Gray, IDG News Service
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
Rambus on Tuesday faced off against Micron Technology in court, starting the latest chapter in a string of legal battles Rambus has waged over computer memory patents.
The two companies faced off in U.S. District Court in Delaware over Rambus allegations that memory manufactured by Boise, Idaho-based Micron infringed on memory design patents held by Rambus.
Both sides made presentations in front of Judge Roderick R. McKelvie on Tuesday, but there were no significant decisions made, Micron spokesperson Sean Mahoney says. The judge will call on both parties Monday to discuss discovery, or examination of evidence, and possibly set a date for trial, Mahoney says. Although Micron has asked for a jury trial, it is unclear at this point whether that will be granted, he adds.
Rambus has seen its share of ups and downs since Toshiba became the first company to sign a license agreement for use of Rambus technology, after it was faced with a legal challenge last year.
Since then, six other chip manufacturers, including Hitachi, NEC, and Samsung Electronics, have agreed to pay royalties to the company. Three other companies, Micron, Infineon Technologies, and South Korea-based Hynix Semiconductor have refused to acknowledge the company's patents and are fighting in court to avoid paying royalties.
Heading to Court
The first to get a court date in the U.S. was Infineon, which faced off with Rambus in April in U.S. District Court in Richmond, Virginia. That case eventually saw U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne dismiss all 57 counts of copyright infringement brought by Rambus relating to its design patents in manufacturing SDRAM and DDR SDRAM chips.
Rambus was dealt another blow in that case, a $3.5 million fine in the form of punitive damages for fraud, which Payne later reduced to $350,000. At that time, Payne ruled that Rambus improperly obtained patents on chips that were being developed by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council while the company was participating in the group. In its defense, Rambus claimed that the JEDEC's guidelines on participation are confusing and that other members flout the rules.
The court later set aside a jury verdict from the trial clearing the memory chip designer of allegations that it set standards relating to a technology used to accelerate memory chips.
However, there are still a dozen patents involved in other Rambus cases in the U.S. and Europe, Rambus said in a statement at the time. Rambus plans to appeal the Virginia ruling and also has filed a similar lawsuit against Infineon in Germany.
Rambus also holds newly issued patents covering SDRAM and DDR SDRAM that have not yet been entered into any litigation and are not affected by the court's decision, the company said in May after Payne threw out Infineon's claims. |
