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

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (44952)	6/19/2000 12:02:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Zeev, The question of how much of the "total" SDRAM, DDR and RDRAM is based on how much IP is irrelevant to how much royalties are paid. I hope that is not true. If so, the next business will be IP companies which collect trivial patents and the combined royalties snatch 100% of sales. This would be catastrophic to the industry. You are giving me some ideas though... Scumbria

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (44952)	6/20/2000 4:13:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Zeev Hed; Thanks for responding. Some more questions: You wrote: "IBM used to license out a number of suites of patents and each suites added 1% to royalties to a cap of 5% paid to IBM. Thus 1% to 2% is far for excessive if other IP do not load the product with an additional royalties in excess of 3% to 6% (including "internal royalties for internal patents and cross licenses)." Now suppose that Hitachi is shut out of the DRAM business by the Rambus lawsuit. What would their management do? The first thing they would have to do is to sell their manufacturing facilities to someone who could make the parts. Then they have a bunch of DRAM patents, including the rather significant one for the registers that SDRAM uses to hold the data and addresses. That patent alone is completely and totally unavoidable by all makers of synchronous memory. Now they have a big pile of IP, and need to maximize its value. So they create a set of RMBS sized companies, each with a dozen employees or so, and give each 100 DRAM patents. Since they have thousands of DRAM patents, they should be able to start up dozens of such companies. Then they spin off the companies and take them all public. Currently, the other memory makers have cross licensing agreements with Hitachi, but they can wait for those agreements to expire, just like Texas Instruments did some years ago. Each of those several dozen little company then proceeds to take a 2% cut of DRAM royalties. What do you think happens then? What if one of those little companies decides to charge extremely high royalties to companies that use Rambus technology? Hitachi has > 22000 issued patents. Hitachi DRAM patents: (AN/Hitachi AND ABST/memory): 2375 patents. Hits 1 through 50 out of 2375 164.195.100.11 -- Carl