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Rambus says NVIDIA products infringe on 17 Rambus patents

Rambus is no stranger to the world of patent infringement suits. Today it announced that it filed a patent infringement suit against NVIDIA in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

The suit alleges that NVIDIA infringed upon Rambus patents with a variety of its products including NVIDIA products with memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 SDRAM. In all Rambus alleges that NVIDIA has infringed on 17 Rambus patents.

Rambus said that it pursued licensing agreements with NVIDIA for years with no agreements being made. Rambus wants injunctive relief barring further infringement, contributory infringement, and inducement to infringe the patents in question. Rambus also seeks monetary damages for the alleged infringement.

Tam Lavelle, senior VP and general counsel for Rambus said, “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. 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.”

According to Rambus, the vast majority of NVIDIA products going back for years infringed on its patents. If NVIDIA loses the suit in court it could be looking at a significant penalty, possibly ever more than the $306.9 million.

NVIDIA is already feeling pressure from investors and analysts after announcing disappointing profits last quarter, a loss in this case could make things even worse.

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Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Frazzle on 7/11/2008 3:04:29 PM , Rating: 3
Their cashflow must be low again.

Do they make money any other way?




RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By vapore0n on 7/11/2008 3:39:45 PM , Rating: 4
I though rambus went down when their rambus ram failed.

Maybe they should have gone down, to prevent them from becoming patent leeches


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By RMSe17 on 7/11/2008 3:56:37 PM , Rating: 2
Their ram was used in some game consoles since then


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Clauzii on 7/12/2008 1:38:40 AM , Rating: 3
Not was, ARE. The PS3 achieves it's 25GB/s bandwidth thru use of RAMBUS technoligy, called XDR, Xtreme Data Rate.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Lightnix on 7/12/2008 9:09:06 AM , Rating: 2
That's not so "xtreme" - in fact it's not very "xtreme" at all, even the 6800 GT had 32GB/s bandwidth.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Clauzii on 7/12/2008 2:33:17 PM , Rating: 2
Theres a BIG difference of Graphics Memory and normal memory. You can't compare those two. You COULD say that the GPU memory is low at 25GB (a little more than an old Radeon 9800Pro) but also the CPU gat's this 25 GB bandwidth, which is at least double the speed as a normal PC memorysystem.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Lightnix on 7/12/2008 4:07:05 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah I know, just a light hearted comment.

Still, your response provoked me and I did a little reading, came up with these numbers:

* 128-bit memory bus width
* 22.4 GB/s read and write bandwidth
(copypasted off wiki)

The memory configuration for the RSX, the GeForce 7800-a-like GPU in the PS3.

Surely the thing must be crippled?


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Clauzii on 7/13/2008 9:11:26 PM , Rating: 2
Totally, but I was talking CPU-RAM relationship. No PC achieves that speed yet.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By emboss on 7/13/2008 11:14:14 PM , Rating: 2
Depends on how you define "PC". A dual Opteron system will hit circa 25 GB/sec. A dual Xeon (eg: Mac Pro) will do ~21 GB/s if you feed it right. In the non-x86-world, a dual UltraSPARC T2 can do 64 GB/sec in theory, though I haven't seen any real-world numbers on it yet.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Solandri on 7/11/2008 4:02:22 PM , Rating: 5
They hedged their bets by subverting JEDEC and tricking it into incorporating stuff that they were secretly awaiting patents on. That way if RAMBUS memory failed (as it did), they could then hit up all the other major memory players for patent infringement. It wouldn't have worked, except the other memory companies are also bastards who play dirty, and ticked off the judge in their case.

Eventually we're going to end up with a system so encumbered with patents and copyrights that nobody can develop anything new without paying outlandish royalty fees. Development will grind to a halt as a tiny fraction of the population will have essentially imposed a tax on modern living payable to themselves.

Then some upstart country will choose to ignore all that Intellectual Property and become the new technology leader of the world. That's what the U.S. did to the U.K. during the early industrial revolution. My bet right now is that's what China is going to do to the U.S. unless the U.S. wakes up and starts pounding some common sense into all these people worshiping the cult of IP. IP is supposed to benefit both the originators and society, not just the originators. When the originators are able to hold back society through their IP, it means IP law has shifted too far in their favor.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By gerf on 7/11/08, Rating: -1
RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By codeThug on 7/12/2008 9:43:39 PM , Rating: 3
You dare mention slashdot on this site? 50 lashes and -100 mod points you cretin :)


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By cbf on 7/11/2008 5:04:11 PM , Rating: 3
Rambus has now been exonerated from the charge of "subverting JEDEC" by three separate courts. The most Rambus may have done is keep their mouths shut while JEDEC adopted technology that Rambus has patents *pending* on. The courts that exonerated Rambus did so because they interpreted the wording of JEDEC's patent disclosure rules as only covering granted patents, not pending patents.

Note that Rambus did *not* suggest or in any way suggest that JEDEC adopt these technologies. In most cases (as the FTC administrative law judge ruled), there were really no alternatives. And yes, Rambus has essentially patented virtually all the ways of implementing high speed memory (except perhaps the bad ones -- e.g. FB-DIMMs).

Furthermore, many of the members of JEDEC actually knew about Rambus technology because they were in licensing discussions with Rambus and seen Rambus technology under non-disclosure agreements.

There is also clear evidence that the "failure" of Rambus RDRAM was almost entirely due to illegal collusion on the part of the major memory vendors to keep it out of the market -- this is legal fact: http://www.edn.com/article/CA6333724.html, and the participants (Hynix, Infineon, & Samsung) pled guilty and paid a $160M fine (at the time, the 2nd largest criminal antitrust fine in US history). Rambus' civil anti-trust case against those companies is pending.

I'm not a big fan of what patent law has done in software, but if the law is going to be what it is, then companies like Rambus with legitimate hard patents, ought to be entitled to get their due instead of being strung out by the courts for a decade.

Btw, I think AMD/ATI has not been sued because they've had a Rambus license for some years.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Some1ne on 7/11/2008 5:16:16 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
The most Rambus may have done is keep their mouths shut while JEDEC adopted technology that Rambus has patents *pending* on. The courts that exonerated Rambus did so because they interpreted the wording of JEDEC's patent disclosure rules as only covering granted patents, not pending patents.


So because of a technicality, Rambus's actions were therefore just?

That may get them off in the legal sense, but it doesn't mean that Rambus's behavior is even remotely acceptable.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Murst on 7/11/2008 5:29:13 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
So because of a technicality, Rambus's actions were therefore just?

What actions do you believe were unjust? Please provide a reasonable alternative to JEDEC's proposal that would not use technology developed by Rambus.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Some1ne on 7/11/2008 5:58:17 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
What actions do you believe were unjust?


1. Filing lawsuits against companies following JEDEC specifications when Rambus knew full well from the beginning that the specs were going to end up including things patented by Rambus.

2. Not voluntarily speaking up during the initial drafting process as soon as it was noticed that the JEDEC proposal included things that Rambus was already in the process of patenting.

Because Rambus didn't do the second thing, as far as I am concerned they have forfeited their right to do the first thing. If they had objections to having their patented work be part of the JEDEC guidelines, and to having other companies follow those guidelines, then they should have voiced their dissent during the drafting process. If they had done that, and JEDEC had still chosen to include Rambus's patents in the specifications, then they'd have a justification for filing their lawsuits. However, because they quietly went along with it, knowing full well that their pending patents were being drafted into the specs, they have no right to be complaining about it now, and they certainly don't have any right to be trying to profit from their actions.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By omnicronx on 7/11/2008 7:55:03 PM , Rating: 2
All of which is probabably a big reason as to why Nvidia has not bothered paying any licensing fees. They probably assume they will get off of any suits laid against them.


RE: Rambus cooking up more torts?
By Solandri on 7/11/2008 5:40:38 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
Rambus has now been exonerated from the charge of "subverting JEDEC" by three separate courts. The most Rambus may have done is keep their mouths shut while JEDEC adopted technology that Rambus has patents *pending* on. The courts that exonerated Rambus did so because they interpreted the wording of JEDEC's patent disclosure rules as only covering granted patents, not pending patents.

That may be the correct legal interpretation of the rules as written, but is obviously wrong by any common sense interpretation. Why would a standards organization write up rules requiring disclosure of granted patents, but not of pending patents? The rules were there so everyone would know if an adopted standard might lead to future patent problems. The court's interpretation used the letter of the rules to violate the spirit of the rules.

quote:
Note that Rambus did *not* suggest or in any way suggest that JEDEC adopt these technologies. In most cases (as the FTC administrative law judge ruled), there were really no alternatives. And yes, Rambus has essentially patented virtually all the ways of implementing high speed memory (except perhaps the bad ones -- e.g. FB-DIMMs).
Which was the whole point of the JEDEC