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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (117326)	6/23/2000 2:45:00 PM
From: pgerassi	Respond to of 1570940

Dear Ali and John: After reviewing the patent, I see that claim 1 section C restricts the patent to where the address is sent less the size of the address. That means that to transfer the row address or the column address of the underlying chips must be done with more than one transfer each. All current SDRAM DIMMs transfer the row and column addresses in parallel in one transfer each. Since this is an aspect of DRAM which has been used since the early 70's (definitely prior art (I have even examples of 1K bit DRAM built around 1975 in still working computers)), the Rambus Patent shown here cannot cover SDRAM DIMMs, the chips on which they are made or anything to do with them as they clearly violate claim 1C. All other claims are based on claim 1 and thus are also violated. However, in any DRDRAM chip, the column (or is it row?) address is sent 3 bits at a time thus does not violate claim 1C. There appears to be nothing in this patent that could stop SDRAM DIMMs that have seperate control/address/data lines from being made without rights to this patent. Thus Rambus lawsuit against Hitachi could not be based on this patent. Considering the above, I think the case was settled by management that decided that the costs in time and money were not worth fighting the claim. This is typical of the corporate lawyer mindset. Since Rambus is the plantiff, the court may force Rambus to pay any costs of a suit by the defendent who could easily prove that this patent does not cover JEDEC SDRAM DIMMs. Thus Rambus would probably go bankrupt. Besides, I think that any settlement should be made public in patent disputes to prevent rolling litigation. Pete