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

To: The Prophet who wrote (76297)	7/28/2001 5:04:33 PM
From: pheilman_	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Having spent some time at a company based on IP, and having obtained a patent, I feel I have some understanding of IP. (The patent I obtained was rather trivial, but I have been through the process.) The issue here is the use of continuation to modify an existing patent based on someone else's current ideas. And thereby get a legal earlier date on a patent. Rambus' omnibus patent described Rambus operation, the memory makers at Jedec later evolved DRAM to become SDRAM, Rambus used the ambiguity in their original patent to continue and attempt to include SDRAM. This led to the ridiculous timeline of a patent being filled for SDRAM in ~1998, four years after SDRAM was shipped in volume. (Released on November 22nd 1994, the Sega Saturn was the first major consumer product using SDRAM.) The New Jersey court wisely slapped them down. There are so many patents in the electronics field that most companies sign cross-licensing agreements, Rambus did not have to cross-license, as they did not manufacture anything. This allowed them to charge excessive royalties for SDRAM and DDR.

To: The Prophet who wrote (76297)	7/28/2001 7:16:04 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi The Prophet; Re: "The litigation was lost based on the Markman ruling and a "fraud" claim that will be very carefully scrutinized on appeal." If Rambus had invented the concept of putting synchronizing registers on DRAM they'd have patented that idea. They didn't. Instead, they patented the idea of making a rather complex packet oriented memory interface. A good number of the memory makers who were at the JEDEC SDRAM meetings made SRAM in addition to DRAM. And SRAM had synchronizing registers added to it in 1989, before Rambus was founded. The reason they went into SRAM first was because SRAM was higher bandwidth. The thing a lot of you guys don't realize is that *adding synchronizing registers to a DRAM increased the latency*. In other words, synchronizing registers, like everything else in engineering, have a downside. It wasn't that no one had thought of this before, the idea of pipelining memory probably dates to the lace making machines that first ran off cards in what, the 19th century? It's just that DRAM technology didn't gain anything from pipelining until other things (like DRAM CAS access rate, maximum clock rates, I/O drive rates, DRAM logic costs, etc.) became ripe for SDRAM. By adding pipelining stages to the SDRAM, the memory industry forced memory designers to choose those points to place the pipeline stages. Before, when memory was asynchronous, designers had more choices. Those choices were only eliminated by industry when speeds became so high that the reduction in general utility, and increase in latency, was overcome by the increase in bandwidth performance. But this is probably way too subtle for the local crowd to understand. Re: "The funny thing about engineers who are not themselves inventors, but rather just modifiers, is that they have a strong belief in "sharing" for free. Real inventors, like Zeev, appreciate what it is like to truly be ripped off." "Ripped off" is when a couple of greedy academics stretch a patent for a silly memory idea to sort of cover a memory technology that they didn't invent, and then try to extort a kings ransom from an industry that actually makes a useful product. But we know what happened to them in the courts, don't we. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! -- Carl