The legal battle that has been going on between Rambus and the three DDR-SDRAM manufacturers, Micron, Hynix and Samsung, has now taken a new turn now that Rambus has managed to convince a judge to allow certain e-mail correnspondence as evidence in the trial. Rambus has in several cases sued DDR-SDRAM manufacturers for using illegal competing methods to kick Rambus out of the memory market. In the individual cases it has been able to reach several agreements with manufacturers and Hynix has since earlier been convicted and had to pay $306 million in damage to Rambus due to violations of Rambus patents. The last big case is against all three previously mentioned companies, which Rambus has accused of working together with lowering prices of DDR-SDRAM to make computer manufacturers pick this technology over Rambus equivalent.
The correpondence that has now been made available has earlier been protected from being used in court but now Rambus has been granted access to these documents and the content was very representative for the case. Several mails contained very informative conversations between competing DDR-SDRAM manufacturers.
“One e-mail, dated June 5, 2001, from Micron Vice-President Linda Turner to other Micron employees was in response to worries about prices on DDR-DRAM that had been falling. “No problem!,” Turner wrote. “We want DDR to explode in the marketplace so have actually been requesting Infineon, Samsung, and Hynix to lower their DDR pricing to help it become a standard (and drive Rambus away completely).”
Rambus truly has a trump here to battle Hynix, Micron and Samsung which in their defence claim that their actions where not the reason Rambus DRAM didn’t manage to get a foot in on the market. It is supposedely the complexity of the technology and costs surrounding it that was the deciding factor.
