Legal eagles
Don't be surprised to see the head-hunters coming after Rambus lawyers in the near future, because they are delivering plenty for their current employer these days.
Only last week, Korean technology giant Samsung agreed to hand over a bunch of cash to use some previously disputed Rambus patents, then, late on Friday, Rambus announced that the latest phase in a long-running claim against NVIDIA and its AIB ecosystem had resulted in a ruling in its favour.
The Administrative Law Judge for its U.S. International Trade Commission found in favour of Rambus, that NVIDIA and co infringed on three of the five patents Rambus is defending. This ruling can be appealed, however.
"Following an extensive hearing process, we are pleased with the ALJ's determination that three of our patents are valid and infringed," said Tom Lavelle, SVP and general counsel at Rambus. "We are obviously disappointed with the result for the other asserted patents and intend to request the Commission's review of the corresponding portions of the Initial Determination."
The patents concern some memory controllers that are used in NVIDIA GPUs. Thus the case is against all NVIDIA broad partners and even HP is named. The case was first brought in November 2008 and concerned nine patents, but Rambus dropped four of them last year. It's unlikely anything material will result from this ruling until the appeals process is completed, but NVIDIA has yet to comment.
