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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: multicollinearity who wrote (44798)	6/17/2000 12:49:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Multi, I am an author of college textbooks and was also disturbed by Scumbria's remark. I spend about 5 years working on a text and feel that I am entitled to compensation through the payment of royalties. Is Scumbria implying that this is a dishonest expectation and that all should be allowed to freely copy one's finished product? Rambus did not invent DDR or SDRAM. They have never made an SDRAM or DDR design. They most certainly do not have an SDRAM or DDR "finished product". Rambus does have some broad, simple, obvious, architectural patents which may or may not cover certain aspects of SDRAM and DDR designs. In contrast, the designers and manufacturers of SDRAM products have a huge amount of IP in their products. I have an incredibly hard time believing that the courts (worst case) will accept Rambus' claimed IP as adding more than a small fraction of a percent value to the products on the marketplace. I'm not a lawyer, but from my engineering point of view, the Toshiba deal appears way out of line. Which is why I am suspicious about the circumstances of the deal. Scumbria

To: multicollinearity who wrote (44798)	6/17/2000 3:30:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 93625

Multi, I did some thinking, and I'm starting to understand why there is so much confusion about IP on this thread. IP in the semiconductor industry is a huge, high-stakes game. Patents are generally issued for very simple and small ideas or concepts. You can't patent a microprocessor design, but you can sometimes patent very small details about the microprocessor if you did something slightly different than anything reported in the past. Most patents are issued for very obvious and simple concepts, but nevertheless they serve as an important piece of business ammunition. This is vastly different from a copyright on a book. Let's look at one patent in question, the programmable delay on a memory read in a synchronous DRAM circuit. Ignoring for now Ali's contention that the patent itself has been altered, lets look at the technological details. This is a completely obvious and essential piece of logic in a memory circuit. EDO memory controllers used similar registers to control the RAS to CAS latency long before anyone heard of SDRAM. This allowed you to use different speed DRAMS in a system with the same memory controller. Rambus believes that they have (opportunisticaly) extended this patent to synchronous controllers and synchronous memories. There is in fact, no other rational way to set the memory delay on reads, and it is rather obviously necessary, but Rambus has managed to obtain a patent. Their claims on this particular patent do not seem to me indicative of hard word or innovation, except on the part of their patent law department. Scumbria