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

To: Ali Chen who wrote (72851)	5/14/2001 6:34:05 PM
From: John Walliker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Ali, Trying to avoid the issue? Not at all. The paper was interesting, but I don't see how it supports your point of view. "Which particular technologies were pioneered by Rambus," They are laid out in the patents. As far as I can see the only real dispute relates to whether the Markman ruling is appropriate. In other words, does a memory interface which uses many of the ideas embodied in Rambus' design infringe if it omits to use a bus multiplexed in a particular way. Nobody claims, for example, that using both edges of a clock to time data transfers was Rambus' invention. Nor does anyone claim that the delay locked loop was their invention. However, it is perfectly valid to combine together previously known techniques to make a new combination and to patent that. Combining that with a method of driving a bus which was completely novel, both in the use of constant current drive to allow superposition of signals and the ability to have a bus longer than one bit-time makes for totally cast-iron patent protection of the "crown jewels". The difficulty has been that the original bus definition was very tightly drawn, no doubt on legal advice, to gain the strongest possible protection of the "crown jewels". This has hindered Rambus' attempts to broaden the scope of their patents to cover SDRAM and DDR which undoubtedly benefited from Rambus' pioneering work, but do not include every element of it. Prior to the Markman ruling, they appeared to have been successful in this. Now that is in doubt. What is not in any doubt is the strength of the patents protecting Rambus memory. Nor is there any doubt (in my mind at least) that Rambus has the potential to scale to much higher frequencies than DDR. It will be especially interesting to see what happens in the European trials where different law applies. John