June 2 - 3:55pm EDT   NVIDIA on Tuesday announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has initially rejected 41 patent infringement claims regarding seven patents Rambus has filed against NVIDIA back in July of 2008. NVIDIA challenged these claims in November of 2008, when Rambus filed a complaint in an International Trade Commission (ITC) action. All patent infringement claims from Rambus relate to memory controllers in graphics processors. [full story]

May 14 - 4:05pm EDT   The US Federal Trade Commission today dropped its antitrust case against memory producer Rambus. The company had previously been found guilty of abusing its monopoly power but successfully won an appeal in 2008; the FTC's decision to quit follows after its own appeal was rejected in February and the government body considered its options. Officials say the departure comes after they decide it would "not be in the public interest" to pursue Rambus further. [full story]

February 2 - 8:20am EST   Rambus today will demo a new RAM technology that it believes could be needed for more advanced visuals on smartphones. Labeled the Mobile Memory Initiative, the approach uses a variant of the separate, flexible clock speeds used in XDR memory (found in the PlayStation 3) but with very low-power, low variance signaling that creates very high bandwidth without ramping up the power draw. MMI would allow 4.3 gigabits per second from a single chip but a typical voltage of just 100mV, providing about five times the headroom of the 800-megabit mobile memory available today [full story]

November 7 - 4:55pm EST   In addition to filing a lawsuit against graphics hardware maker NVIDIA back in July, technology licensing company Rambus has filed a formal complaint against the company on Thursday with the US International Trade Commission. Rambus has requested an investigation of NVIDIA products that it hopes would lead to the barring of importation, sale for importation and sale after importation of the latter's products that Rambus believes infringe on nine of its patents. [full story]

July 11 - 11:50am EDT   As if NVIDIA wasn't in enough hot water already, reports have high-speed memory interface maker Rambus Inc. suing the graphics chip maker over patent infringements. The lawsuit, filed in a Nothern District of California court, implies NVIDIA's memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR and GDDR3 SDRAM infringe upon 17 Rambus patents. [full story]

March 27 - 4:10pm EDT   Memory producer Rambus today revealed that it will petition for an injunction against industry rival Hynix, barring the latter from shipping RAM that allegedly infringes on Rambus patents. The action was requested after a federal court green-lighted legal efforts against Hynix as well as fellow memory producers Micron and Nanya, saying that the move to enforce patents would not tread on US antitrust laws. Rambus has said it would be willing to license the patents in exchange for royalties for memory sold. [full story]

November 28 - 2:15pm EST   Memory maker Rambus today unveiled its Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative, a new effort to cross a symbolic barrier for computer memory speed. The plan will see a new form of RAM that can pass 32 bits of data in one clock cycle versus the two bits of today's memory and splits the signaling between data and commands or memory addressing. The net effect is to provide 16 gigabits per second of bandwidth with a single 500MHz memory chip -- about 16 times the performance of today's DDR2 memory standard at the same clock rate. [full story]