EC accuses Rambus of DRAM 'patent ambush'
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(InfoWorld) - Six months afterÂ U.S. regulators capped royalties that vendors must pay to Rambus, the European Union (EU) is taking a close look at the company's monopoly on the DRAM (dynamic RAM) chip market. On July 30, the European Commission (EC) issued a preliminary "Statement of Objections" finding that the Los Altos, Calif., company violated EU competition law by not disclosing that it owned relevant patents during the development of the DRAM standard. DRAM chips provide the memory in computers. The existence of this Statement of Objections was disclosed Thursday in a Commission press release. "Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard," the statement said. "This type of behavior is known as a 'patent ambush.'" Against this background, the Commission provisionally considers that Rambus breached the EC Treaty's rules on abuse of a dominant market position." "Without its 'patent ambush,' Rambus would not have been able to charge the royalty rates it currently does," the statement said. Rambus now has nine weeks to respond before the Commission will decide whether or not the company is in violation of European law. Earlier this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ordered Rambus to license its DRAM technology to other vendors and put a cap on the royalties it can charge. Rambus's patent claims have also been the subject of numerous lawsuits between Rambus and chip makers who reject the company's patent claims. "These are largely the same issues examined by a number of US courts, the Federal Trade Commission, and currently before the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit," said Thomas Lavelle, Rambus's senior vice president and general counsel, in a statement. "We are studying the Statement of Objections and plan to respond in due course."
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Wisconsin silicon heads The patent defense arm of the University of Wisconsin hit Intel with a lawsuit this week, claiming abuse of intellectual property related to parallel processing.â¦
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Japanese electronics giant Toshiba said it is taking legal action against major South Korean microchip maker Hynix in Tokyo and Texas for alleged infringement of Toshiba's semiconductor memory patents.
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Japan&#39;s Toshiba Corp., claiming patent infringement in flash-memory chips on the part of Korean semiconductor manufacturer Hynix, filed a lawsuit with Tokyo District Court on Monday.
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Rambus, the memory chip technology developer, is looking to the future world of multimedia as the way for its XDR memory chips to find their way into more mainstream products.The memory technology is currently used mainly in game consoles, but Japanese DRAM (dynamic RAM) maker Elpida Memory unveiled a speedy DRAM chip based on XDR technology, the 512Mb, 4.8GHz XDR DRAM. The chips are aimed at game consoles, HDTVs (high-definition televisions), PCs, servers and workstations.But one knock against the company is that while its products may be used in some high end applications, they have not trickled down into the mainstream because they cost too much compared to DDR2 (double date, second generation) DRAM and other technologies. Regardless, Rambus CEO Harold Hughes, sees 2008 as a breakout year for Rambus technology to enter higher volume production as it wins over some HDTV clients.He said people should also be on the lookout for XDR technology to make some headway into cellular phones and other mobile devices.Hughes was in Taipei for the Rambus Developer Forum, and discussed new products in an interview with IDG News Service (IDGNS).IDGNS: What are the major product areas Rambus will focus on in the next year for its XDR memory technology?Harold Hughes: I think 2008 will see a few big [technology trends] moving forward in computers, HDTVs and the game players, and some of the neatest stuff will come out on cell phones. Those are four markets where Rambus is well positioned, so we hope to have a great year.IDGNS: What is Rambus working on in the mobile market? Handsets, ultramobile PCs?Hughes: Consumers want everything that they have on a desktop in one of these things (he holds up an iPhone) and obviously the bandwidth requirements are very, very high relative to what used to be the case for a simple little phone, and all that needs to be supplied at incredibly low power. Well, we&#39;ve made what I think are some astonishing breakthroughs in low-power technology that are in many cases as much as 80 percent over existing technology. In applications where you&#39;re using full motion videos (TV on mobile phones) much lower power with full motion videos.We&#39;re looking forward to making our mark in the low-power and mobile market. Our approach will be to use the bandwidth cores available with XDR, but to use our very low power interfaces to drive those, and to do that not only through our suppliers but also to look to some of the major players in the cell phone industry to bring them to market in 2008 or 2009. It most likely won&#39;t be XDR as we know it, but it might be derived from XDR. It has to be high bandwidth and extremely low power and it has to have low packaging cost.IDGNS: Can you give an idea of what you mean by low power?Hughes: We have introduced some very interesting low-power technology. We put out a [research paper] and we showed that we could deliver 2.2Gbps at 100 milliwatts. Mind-bogglingly low, 2.2 milliwatts per gigabit per second. We could run it off two-double AA batteries. The joke we was that we would try to get it to run off of a potato. We passed 3,600 terabits of data through our interface with two-AA batteries, which is the equivalent of 100 DVDs.IDGNS: Why do you think XDR fits the HDTV market?The XDR products are doing very well in the gaming products and we&#39;ll talk about the HDTV market. It&#39;s truly amazing the kind of compute requirements there, but it&#39;s also a consumer electronics product so it&#39;s got all the issues of cost and it&#39;s also the size, the electronic migration, the fans and stuff, so it&#39;s really bandwidth per device, and that&#39;s where XDR really stands out, in bandwidth per device. Such that with one or two XDR devices, you can get adequate to deal with the 5-10Gbps of bandwidth these televisions are using. That&#39;s where working with companies like Elpida and other licensees we can have an adequate supply of XDR so we can do great things in the HDTV market.IDGNS: What PC trends will help push more Rambus memory into PCs?Hughes: The new generation of computers is going to have these multiple core processors, which are just driving incredibly attractive and interesting PCs. What&#39;s interesting is the nature of the cores. They are not only standard compute cores, but they are also graphics cores. For us, we&#39;re very happy on multiple levels. That&#39;s going to produce a greater need for memory bandwidth. In particular, the multi-core processors that have compute and graphics have conflicting needs insofar as the memory architecture is concerned. The computing requires capacity and graphics requires bandwidth. Rambus has a product called the XDR which offers multiple gigabytes of capacity and quite remarkable bandwidth, and in fact Elpida has productized a 4.8GHz part, so that&#39;s a pretty speedy product.IDGNS: Rambus appears to be doing well in products at the top-end of the market, such as game consoles, but how is the company working to target the mainstream and lower-cost markets?Keep in mind that we believe that embedded in DDR2 is no small part of Rambus technology and that unfortunately is the subject of lots of litigation and there&#39;s no indication that&#39;s going to stop in the near future. I think that&#39;s always inevitable with our business model. I think that&#39;s almost inevitable given our business model, putting aside the litigation aspects of it. For a 400-person company to have impact and for IP to have value, you must solve problems well out into the future. Those problems are only going to be usable initially be a relatively small subset, but as that then starts to proliferate through more supply and costs come down, then you see those products trickle down to the $200 laptop.I don&#39;t see that that model is going to change. We are working on memories that have truly staggering performance. Initially those will probably be actual parts incorporating as many of our features as possible, but by definition because of their performance there will be a limited number of applications that need it, but X number of years later, not only will those discrete parts become cheaper and likely migrate into higher volumes, but the ingredients in those parts are very likely to go into very low-performance, low-cost applications that are used widely.IDGNS: What else do you see for 2008 that&#39;s big?Hughes: Games will improve dramatically. The software development kits are continuing to improve such that I think games will be able to take advantage of more of the cycles. You know how they CAT scan a brain when its thinking? Well I suspect if they were to do the same thing with a cell processor on current games, it would show that a lot of those transistors aren&#39;t being turned on, especially when you&#39;re using an abstracted development code.Ultimately [game developers] will learn how to directly address hardware more and more and I think you&#39;ll see those games coming out more in 2008 and they&#39;ll probably be spectacular, frankly. Of course, I&#39;ve given up on games. Competing with your son is, well it&#39;s so humiliating. You&#39;re getting killed in a game and you don&#39;t even know what&#39;s going on.
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(InfoWorld) - A day after winning a patent infringement lawsuit against a Taiwanese memory chip maker Japan's Fujitsu Ltd. has filed to have the chips in question barred from Japan. TheÂ Tokyo District Court Thursday upheld Fujitsu claims that DRAM (dynamic RAM) memory chips made by Nanya Technology Corp. infringed upon patents held by Fujitsu. The court granted an injunction against future import and sales of the chips. Fujitsu said Friday it had filed an application with Japan's customs authority to suspend import of the DRAM chips under the country's customs law. The lawsuit concerned a patent related to a technology for improving the speed of DDR SDRAM (double data rate synchronous dynamic RAM) memory chips and was filed just over two years ago after talks between the two companies produced no agreement on patent licensing. "We've been in IP discussions [with Fujitsu] for a while. It's regretful that we have not reached an agreement yet," said Pai Pei-lin, vice president of sales at Nanya Technology Corp. The case with Fujitsu probably won't have much impact on Nanya in the near term, he said, because it's been going on for a while and the company has already made contingency plans. Nanya will most likely appeal the decision, but company lawyers will have to take a close look at the ruling before making such a decision, he said. Nanya is fighting a similar case with Fujitsu in the U.S., but the proceedings there look more favorable for Nanya than the Japan ruling, he added. Â
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Four new investigations involve chips and computing devices, including possible patent violations.
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Brussels braces for the next battle Intellectual property lobbyists are warning that new plans to shake up Europe's policy on patents could put patentable software back on the menu, as well as upping legal fees and putting small businesses in jeopardy.â¦
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The chipmaker's warning raises concerns about the flash memory business, one financial analyst says in a report.
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Barracuda Networks plans to focus on finding prior art to defend itself and the open-source ClamAV project against patent claims by rival antivirus vendor Trend Micro, which stressed Tuesday that it owns a tested and valid patent.Barracuda, facing a Trend Micro complaint before the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), will work on showing the agency that other companies used gateway antivirus scanning before Trend Micro received its patent in 1997, Barracuda said Tuesday. Barracuda, based in California, uses ClamAV code in some of its products.&quot;In their claim, Trend Micro is seeking an interpretation of its ... patent such that would give it exclusive control of gateway antivirus scanning,&quot; said Kylie Heintz, spokeswoman for Barracuda.&quot;We believe that neither our products, nor the free and open-source ClamAV software, infringe the patent, and further we believe that the patent itself is invalid due to prior art,&quot; Heintz said.The USITC launched a formal investigation of the patent claims in December.Barracuda&#39;s announcement that it intended to find prior art spurred action in the open-source community. Early Tuesday, Groklaw, a blog focused on open-source legal issues, posted an announcement asking for help finding prior art.But Trend Micro, which filed the USITC complaint in November, has a &quot;known and time-tested patent,&quot; said Michael Sweeny, a spokesman for Trend Micro. The company won a similar dispute with rival Fortinet before the USITC in May 2005, Trend Micro noted. Fortinet later settled the patent claims, getting a license from Trend Micro.In addition,&#160;Trend Micro filed a similar complaint&#160;against Panda Software International and Panda Distribution, which use a proprietary software package, said Mark Davis, Trend Micro&#39;s outside counsel. Trend Micro has not targeted the ClamAV project, he said. &quot;This is purely against commercial competitors,&quot; Davis added.Commercial software vendor Sourcefire purchased the ClamAV project in August. Sourcefire declined to comment on the patent dispute.Open-source software is not the issue in the USITC complaint, Sweeny added. &quot;We can&#39;t see how this would negatively impact open-source development,&quot; he said.Barracuda CEO Dean Drako called scanning for viruses at the gateway &quot;an obvious and common technique&quot; used by most businesses. Almost anyone, including the owners of more than 1 million ClamAV installations, could be sued by Trend Micro if the company&#39;s patent claims hold up, he said in a statement.Barracuda, maker of hardware containing cybersecurity products, has won support in the dispute from the Software Freedom Law Center, a group working to protect open-source software. The law center is grateful to Barracuda for fighting the patent, said Eben Moglen, the center&#39;s founding director. &quot;Collective defense from software patents is a shared responsibility for everyone in the free software ecosystem,&quot; he said in a statement.Barracuda has a pending lawsuit seeking to invalidate the patent in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division.Trend Micro is misusing the USITC because it&#39;s filing a trade complaint asking the agency to bar importation of a product against a company based in the U.S., Barracuda added. &quot;Barracuda Networks designs and manufactures all of the products in question in the United States,&quot; Drako said in his statement. &quot;We believe Trend Micro&#39;s actions are a blatant abuse of the U.S. legal system.&quot;But Trend Micro said the USITC is an appropriate venue for the patent complaint. The 2005 Fortinet ruling was also against a company based in the U.S., Davis said. &quot;There appear to be several components that are imported,&quot; he said.Trend Micro&#39;s USITC complaint says Barracuda uses code from ClamAV, which is written in part in Europe and Australia. Barracuda also imports hardware components, the complaint says.
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The flash memory maker filed three patent infringement suits against companies that make, sell and import flash storage products.
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Memory chipmaker ordered to cut back size of royalties on DRAM technology; Rambus fights back.
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Toshiba has accused Hynix of infringing its DRAM and Flash patents, and has begun legal proceedings against its South Korean rival in the US and Japanese courts.
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European officials investigating the chip maker say they have a watertight argument for pursuing antitrust charges.
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The Department of Justice charged Infineon with violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by conspiring with unnamed DRAM manufacturers between July 1999 and June 2002 to fix prices on memory sold to computer and server vendors.
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They are asking the European Union Council to reject this proposal. They claim that software patent directive would be harmful to the European economy.
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The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has voted to investigate claims by Trend Micro of competitors&#39; patent infringement involving antivirus products.Trend Micro filed a trade complaint Nov. 21 against fellow cybersecurity vendors Barracuda Networks of Campbell, California; Panda Software International, based in Spain; and Panda Distribution of Glendale, California.Trend Micro&#39;s complaint accuses the three companies of infringing its patent for virus detection and removal apparatus for computer networks. The technology &quot;represents a dramatic departure from the traditional antivirus methods of safeguarding individual computers,&quot; the company says in its complaint.The Trend Micro complaint accuses Barracuda of importing antivirus software that infringes its patent. The complaint says Barracuda uses code from the open-source antivirus product ClamAV, which is written in part in Europe and Australia. Barracuda also imports hardware components, the complaint says.Panda&#39;s products also contain code imported into the U.S., the Trend Micro complaint says.A Barracuda spokeswoman said the complaint is curious. &quot;It is interesting that the ITC has decided to take up an investigation, given Barracuda Networks manufactures all of its products in the United States and does not import anything of significance,&quot; said Kylie Heintz.A Panda representative didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comments.The ITC case will be referred to an administrative law judge, who will schedule and hold an evidentiary hearing. The judge will make an initial determination as to whether there is a violation of section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. That initial determination is subject to commission review.The ITC will make a final determination in the investigation at the earliest practicable time, the commission said in a news release. Within 45 days, the ITC will set a target date for completing the investigation.