Samsung signs SDRAM licensing deal with Rambus

Samsung signs SDRAM licensing deal with Rambus
By Will Wade, EE Times
November 3, 2000 (12:51 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001103S0014

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has agreed to pay an unspecified royalties for its SDRAM devices to Rambus Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.).

Rambus claims that basic elements of its patents for data I/O apply to SDRAM architectures, and has spent much of the past year negotiating licensing agreements with several major memory vendors. To date, NEC Corp., Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and Oki Electric Co. Ltd. have signed deals with Rambus, and this latest agreement with Samsung, the world's largest memory vendor, lends more credibility to Rambus' claims. However, Rambus remains locked in litigation with Hyundai Electronics, Micron Technology Inc. and Infineon Technologies, all of whom dispute the company's assertions.

Terms of the Samsung deal, like most of Rambus' previous SDRAM licensing agreements, were not disclosed, although the companies said that royalty rates for SDRAM designs are greater than those for Rambus DRAM devic es. That condition is seen as an effort to encourage the production of Rambus DRAMs and to discourage SDRAM production. The agreement covers SDRAM, double-data-rate DRAM, and the controllers required to interface with both types of memory.

Skeptics have noted that the ambiguous wording of some of Rambus' licensing deals may hide the fact that little money is changing hands, and that the primary value of the deals is to give some visibility to Rambus' claims. Oki and Toshiba, for example, have been moving away from commodity SDRAMs, and will not be paying many royalties to Rambus for those products. As a big backer of Rambus technology and a leading RDRAM producer, Samsung seems unlikely to be eager to increase its production costs by adding a royalty rate onto its SDRAM production.