Rambus Convinces Nvidia to Sign License Agreement

News
By Douglas Perry
published

Rambus and Nvidia have settled their patent dispute.

The two companies announced that Nvidia has signed a patent license agreement, which applies to "a broad range of integrated circuit (IC) products offered by Nvidia" for a time frame of five years. All claims referring to patent infringement in the past have been settled as well, Rambus said. Further details were kept confidential.

Rambus noted that the "license agreement […] settles our differences and allows [the company] to move forward with Nvidia, the leader in visual and parallel computing.” Nvidia did not provide an official statement.

Rambus filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nvidia in 2008, in which the company claimed that the graphics chip maker infringed on a total of 17 Rambus patents that relate to SDR, DDR and GDDR memory controllers. Nvidia defended itself by stating that Rambus' strategy to patent rather common techniques to manufacture memory is anti-competitive and should be considered theft.

Douglas Perry
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31 Comments Comment from the forums
  • vilenjan
    Why doesn't rambus just go away...
    Reply
  • alyoshka
    Ram Who??????????
    Reply
  • All these costs go to the consumer.
    Reply
  • Rambus is just panicking since the ATI rambus video cards never materialized. They gave in and settled with Nvidia. I hope Nvidia squats on the agreement and doesn't use a single Rambus memory module. Die Rambus die !
    Reply
  • sword of justice
    Freescale, Broadcom and now Nvidia... Finally, the global anti Rambus alliance that pillaged Rambus' IP (a.k.a Intellectual P R O P E R T Y !!!) for more then a decade, are seeing the light of Justice!!

    Now that two of the fiercest Rambus antagonists and leaders of the alliance have caved (Nvidia & Broadcom), ST Micro, MediaTek, LSI and a myriad (literally dozens) of other companies that infringe Rambus DRAM controller IP will be running to Sunnyvale, asking for a Rambus license... Hynix and even Micron won't be far behind (global settlement by April)
    Reply
  • archange
    They should take a bus to he..

    The bad thing is that nV just fueled their idiocy for 5 more years.
    Reply
  • DEVILVSANGEL00
    Rambus dug their own grave and now no one likes them mainly because of their overpriced ram back in the p4 days, this company is done exploiting people and no one wants anything to do with them, lets hope nvidia are just playing along to get rid of this law suit and rambus never make another product again that trys to exploit the market and rip off customers
    Reply
  • hardcore_gamer
    Patent troll and Physx troll :)
    Reply
  • teodoreh
    Great, give away money to rambus - now we'll never get rid of this Troll...
    Reply
  • Wamphryi
    Yes I do recall the days when the original P4 architecture was contractually tied to the Rambus memory products. Intel stopped producing the P3 1 + GHZ CPU early because people would not stop buying them. Then when the P3 technology disappeared from the market AMD had a run that continued to the release of the Northwood core P4 and later the Core 2 Duo. Now just when one might assume Rambus was delegated to the dustbin of history and reduced to a mildly interesting anecdote we discover their greasy presence in the GPU industry. Incredible.
    Reply