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

To: Scumbria who wrote (44802)	6/17/2000 1:44:00 PM
From: multicollinearity	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hello Scumbria: From the strong opposition that you have taken towards Rambus, I was surprised but glad to read that you recently made a nice profit in RMBS calls. IMHO, you would do well to drop your defensiveness and try to profit from the recent and ongoing developments with the company. To those who think the stock is currently too expensive, I believe they will soon look back with deep regrets because an opportunity was missed to buy in the mid-eighties. If we have a decent market Monday, I expect to see a sharp spike upward in the stock. Best, Multico

To: Scumbria who wrote (44802)	6/18/2000 5:22:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Scumbria; BILOW SEES LIGHT ON RMBS!!! I'm beginning to be convinced that Rambus has a good chance of controlling the memory market through their early Base Rambus DRAM patents... If I were short, I would be getting out at the first opportune moment. I agree with Scumbria, that Rambus did not invent SDRAM or DDR, but I think that there is a reasonable chance that the patent courts will allow them blocking patents on the current JEDEC version of SDRAM. If this happens, RMBS would be quite a bargain at its current price. The one patent that rambus has that really applies to SDRAM and DDR, and that is not clearly (to me) prior art, obvious, or easily avoided, is the one for a memory with a control bit(s) that determines the read latency. On SDRAM, this was included in order to allow a single chip to operate with minimum latency over a range of different frequencies. On a typical system shipped to a customer, the values are set on powerup identical each time. It is possible to avoid the patent by hardwiring the values into the memory chip, but then the manufacturers have to stock more device types. With the original SDRAMs, if the industry had known it would get into trouble on this patent issue, they likely could have done something about it. While the patent RMBS mentions that covers this was only issued this year, that patent is a continuation of a patent that was issued about 5 years ago, and that patent seems to me to cover the same ground. In other words, Hitachi's argument that the patent postdates SDRAM is incorrect, I believe. On the other hand, it is strange that Rambus hasn't pushed the SDRAM coverage of its patents until this year. The reason for the delay, I believe, is that they really thought that RDRAM was going to win out. Now they are going to (try to) use their patents to suppress DDR. Over the long run, this makes economic sense for them. If they can force industry to go with RDRAM, then they have a higher likelihood of having controlling IP on the next generation of memory as well. This also makes it clear why the advanced memory consortium (started at the beginning of the year,) didn't include Rambus. It is clearly their intention to cut Rambus out of the next deal. This also makes it clear why Rambus will (try to) charge more for DDR royalties than RDRAM royalties. In spite of their having put lots of effort into designing RDRAM, they need it to win at all costs. I don't think it will be possible for Rambus to prevent DDR from being the next memory technology, regardless of how the courts treat their SDRAM and DDR patents. DDR has too much of an overall cost advantage over RDRAM. RDRAM costs (for the memory subsystem) are going to be 50% over DDR costs over the long term, and a few percent royalties isn't going to make a difference one way or another. This also makes it clear why the memory makers are refusing to make enough RDRAM for Intel. (For instance, Intel is unable to ship Timna with RDRAM, and is now worried about the Willamette.) They are doing this in order to pressure Intel to pressure Rambus to be reasonable on DDR royalties. In addition, this makes me suspect TI's reason for selling its memory division to Micron. TI has a reputation for thoroughly covering its products with patents. TI must have believed that they had SDRAM covered well, in fact Vogley started working on SDRAM when he started at TI back in 1989, and TI has the earliest patents on the subject. They also published articles in the press that predate Rambus' patents, particularly in IEEE Spectrum. (Someone should go get it, I'll give a link if asked.) It is also possible that Hitachi was picked out because Hitachi, in particular, has the patents on the part of SDRAM that allows control over the read latency. The memory makers are mostly outside the US. Rambus is US. This whole thing could result in the worst trade war we've seen in technology in a long time. In any case, the consumers are likely to be shafted until this all settles down. -- Carl