Friday, July 11th 2008
Rambus Files Patent Infringement Suit Against NVIDIA
Rambus Inc., one of the world's premier technology licensing companies specializing in high-speed memory architectures, today announced it has filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against NVIDIA Corporation for patent infringement.
The lawsuit alleges that a number of NVIDIA products with memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 SDRAM infringe 17 Rambus patents. The accused products in the complaint include chipsets, graphics processors, media communication processors, multimedia applications processors and other products from at least six NVIDIA product lines. Rambus is seeking injunctive relief barring the infringement, contributory infringement, and inducement to infringe the Rambus patents, as well as monetary damages.
"For more than six years, we have diligently attempted to negotiate a licensing agreement with NVIDIA, but our good faith efforts have been to no avail," said Tom Lavelle, senior vice president and general counsel at Rambus. "Graphics and multimedia products require leading-edge memory performance, and as NVIDIA advances its product portfolio, it infringes more and more of our patents. We are left with no other recourse than litigation to protect and seek fair compensation for the use of our patented inventions. Nevertheless, we hope to continue discussions with NVIDIA to reach a negotiated settlement."
Further information will be made available at http://investor.rambus.com in the Litigation Update section.
Source:
BusinessWire
The lawsuit alleges that a number of NVIDIA products with memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 SDRAM infringe 17 Rambus patents. The accused products in the complaint include chipsets, graphics processors, media communication processors, multimedia applications processors and other products from at least six NVIDIA product lines. Rambus is seeking injunctive relief barring the infringement, contributory infringement, and inducement to infringe the Rambus patents, as well as monetary damages.
"For more than six years, we have diligently attempted to negotiate a licensing agreement with NVIDIA, but our good faith efforts have been to no avail," said Tom Lavelle, senior vice president and general counsel at Rambus. "Graphics and multimedia products require leading-edge memory performance, and as NVIDIA advances its product portfolio, it infringes more and more of our patents. We are left with no other recourse than litigation to protect and seek fair compensation for the use of our patented inventions. Nevertheless, we hope to continue discussions with NVIDIA to reach a negotiated settlement."
Further information will be made available at http://investor.rambus.com in the Litigation Update section.
17 Comments on Rambus Files Patent Infringement Suit Against NVIDIA
wouldnt all of the affiliate companies be at fault to, because afiak their selling display cards.. ect ect with the same technology, and what about other companies like motherboard manufactures and say.. amd/ati? (now dont flame me ppl, im just curious as to why)
or do all chipset manufactures aside from nvidia currently pay royalties to said rambus whenever they have a similar or existing patented technology which would fall under these 17 or moreso infringments?? :banghead: :twitch:
I was gonna ask how come AMD/ATI wasnt hit by this but Im assuming they licensed the technology? Only thing I can think ok. Speaking of which, how the hell does Rambus even get into GDDR memory?
www.crn.com/it-channel/175800680
Apparently someone needs to buy rambus to kill them . . .
Their architecture sucked when it was in use in my opinion (dimm,spacer,dimm,spacer, no spacers no workie). Guess it’s alright for servers.
Now, as for my comment. It is based on the fact that I haven't seen Rambus come out with any new technology in decades, but they just keep sueing any random person that uses DRAM every few months.
What was the last technology they came up with? XDR DRAM? Yeah, that really caught on, the only reason it even still exists is because the PS3 uses it, it failed in the PC world. What came before that? RD-RAM? How long ago was that? They haven't come up with anything at all, they make the majority of their money off sueing random people that use DRAM. Whenever they start to run low on money, they just sue another DRAM users.
It seems like RAMBUS is in the news for being in court at least once a year, and they haven't been in the news for any actual contribution to the industry in years.
Edit: Yep, a quick look at their history shows that since 2004 they have been in court at least once a year dealing with Patent crap. Sueing Hynix, Samsung, Elpida, Infineon etc. Basically anyone that produces or uses DRAM.
RDRAM was such a joke. I laughed about it then, because it made no sense why anybody would want it over DDR SDRAM. The heat alone is pretty ridiculous.