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| Rambus |
The company is listed on the Rambus now only worth half on Wednesday. This is the result of a dispute, the Rambus completed seven years against Hynix and Micron had. The plaintiff alleged that the two chip manufacturers to prevent price fixing have that Rambus memory held sway even in personal computers, and called up to 4.38 billion U.S. dollars in damages.
After a three month process, and for eight weeks of jury deliberations, the California Supreme Court rejected this accusation back now, according to Reuters. Then crashed the Rambus shares of around 18 U.S. dollars at times only $ 4, the paper then stabilized again at prices around $ 8.
Rambus CEO Harold Hughes said in an initial statement that the company is currently examining the possibility of an appeal. In addition to the antitrust allegations Rambus is with Hynix and Micron also in a patent dispute. Through such processes, the company was caught in the past ten years and over again in the headlines because it had brought all DRAM manufacturer for infringement of its patents in court. In many of these cases, the parties agreed on royalty payments. Last but failed against Rambus HP and Nvidia, with some patents were declared invalid.
The process is now lost but not turned over patents, but the key point in the history of Rambus: The company had tried in 1999 to establish his own technique for standard DIMMs in PCs. Intel had 820 for the chipset for the Pentium II developed, but had to be recalled because of errors. It was also then the only Rambus chipset for PCs, which reached the market.
Following Rambus 'opinion had Hynix and Micron to the success of the technique with a "Joint Attack Rambus' (JRA) is prevented. Although both had made Rambus DRAMs, but should have kept the prices artificially high for it. After Intel had got off the Rambus technology, the two chip makers have raised the prices of competing DDR memory by over 50 percent.
