Rambus Hits IBM With Lawsuit Over Patent Ruling

Rambus is no stranger to filing lawsuits and now the high-performance memory interface specialist has hit IBM gain with a lawsuit.

The fresh lawsuit comes despite a court ruling that said IBM had not infringed on the company’s patents.

The Wrong Ruling

Rambus, which derives the majority of its annual revenue by licensing patents, claimed the US patent office ruling was in error, according to a Reuters report. Rambus obtained the patent in 2002. “The board committed errors of fact and law in its orders, decisions and judgement,” Rambus said in its complaint, according to Reuters.

According to the report, the patent in question concerns “a memory controller that communicates to at least one memory subsystem, with an independent point-to-point link used between the controller and each subsystem,” outlined in the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences ruling on 24 June.

Earlier this month, Rambus announced it signed a patent license agreement with chip maker Nvidia related to certain memory controllers. Under the agreement, Rambus granted Nvidia a patent license for certain memory controllers at a 1 percent royalty rate for SDR memory controllers and a 2 percent royalty rate for other memory controllers, including DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, LPDDR2, GDDR2, GDDR3, GDDR4, and portions of GDDR5 memory controllers. Nvidia granted no licenses to Rambus.

Nvidia Agreement

The agreement followed a patent-infringement suit begun by Rambus against Nvidia in 2008. According to the US International Trade Commission, which 26 July ruled that certain products containing the Nvidia chips may not be imported, Nvidia infringed on three patents held by Rambus.

The ITC ruling pertained to Nvidia’s GeForce, Quadro, nForce, Tesla and Tegra chips, which are used by customers such as Hewlett-Packard, Asustek Computer and Biostar Microtech.

After the ruling, Nvidia officials said the company would pay a bond that will enable it to continue supplying HP and other OEMs with chips while the company appeals the ruling.