Rambus Incorporated (nasdaq: RMBS), founded in 1990, is a provider of high-speed interface technology, however the company is most well known for continually filing lawsuits against other companies which Rambus believes may possibly infringe on one or more of its patents. The majority of Rambus's revenue is believed to come from lawsuits, rather than developing and selling its own technology.

History

Rambus, a California company, was incorporated in 1990 and re-incorporated in Delaware in 1997. The company was listed on NASDAQ in 1997 under the code RMBS. As of February 2006, Rambus derived the majority of its annual revenue by licensing patents for chip interfaces to its customers.

Companies such as AMD, Elpida, Infineon, Intel, Matsushita, NECEL, Renesas, Sony, and Toshiba have taken licenses to Rambus patents for use in their own products.

Rambus' share price has ranged between a high of nearly $150 in 2000 to a low of approxmiately $3 in 2002 with a 4:1 split on June 15, 2000.

Licensing

As a company with no chip production facilities of its own, Rambus conducts business by filing patents and then licensing technologies. For example, Nintendo licensed Rambus memory for the Nintendo 64, as did Sony for use in the PlayStation 2. However, the most famous agreement was with Intel Corporation in 1996, under which Intel became obligated to use RDRAM as the primary memory technology for all Intel platforms until 2002.

In exchange for this, Intel was given a cut of Rambus's royalties, which Intel management anticipated would be a lucrative source of high margin revenue. In reality, the RDRAM standard did not prove to be popular, and motherboard manufacturers simply bought chipsets that supported SDRAM technology from VIA Technologies rather than more expensive RDRAM chipsets from Intel. Ironically in this manner, one of the most enduring achievements of Rambus was to facilitate the rise of VIA Technologies by creating a lucrative market vacuum.

In addition to Intel, SiS also licensed RDRAM, which was used in the SiS R658 chipset. However, it was never popular. The proposed SiS R659, which supports 4 channels of 16-bit 1200 MHz RDRAM, was only available as prototype (TYPE).

As the market for RDRAM was overtaken, Rambus developed new memory interfaces for high speed activity and has continued to license these. Rambus has targeted the graphics card industry and licensed its technology to Sony for incorporation into Cell Technology as implemented with the PlayStation 3. It also developed PCI-E interfaces, and in 2006 it licensed its XDR DRAM memory controller to Toshiba.

Technology

The first PC motherboards with support for RDRAM debuted in 1999. They supported PC800 RDRAM, which operated at 400 MHz but presented data on both rise and fall of clock cycle resulting in effectively 800 MHz, and delivered 1600 MB/s of bandwidth over a 16-bit bus using a 184-pin RIMM form factor. This was significantly faster than the previous standard, PC133 SDRAM, which operated at 133 MHz and delivered 1066 MB/s of bandwidth over a 64-bit bus using a 168-pin DIMM form factor.