Rambus vs Nvidia: patent violations

Yesterday, Rambus, a company specialized in technologies used by the latest generation of memory as well as its intensive "legal activities", announced that it would take Nvidia to court for the violation of 17 of its patents.

These involve SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR and GDDR3-SDRam memory controllers and it concerns chipsets, GPU as well as media communication processors, multimedia applications processors and other products from at least six NVIDIA product lines. In short, this means almost all of Nvidia’s products except software. In addition, the plaintiff is seeking an injunction that will forbid the sale of concerned products as long as the case is unsettled.

Tom Lavelle, Senior Vice-President of the company, says that they tried to find a friendly solution with Nvidia for six years which only led to unsatisfactory results. While it seems that it’s been possible at times to find an agreement with Rambus (for example, AMD signed one with the firm in early 2005), we should keep in mind that the former Intel partner is under investigation by the European Commission for abuse of dominant position involving "patent ambush". Evidently, the Commission isn’t any more pleased with this company than certain manufacturers that have to pay significant royalties…