NEC has become the latest major memory chip maker to sign a licensing agreement with Rambus that calls for the Japanese manufacturer to pay royalties to the U.S.-based memory interface technology design company.
The agreement, announced late Tuesday in a statement issued by Rambus, came only a day after the Mountain View, California-based design company had upped the stakes in its ongoing patent spat with two other major memory makers.
NEC and Rambus have signed a broad licensing agreement covering technologies used in the main memory chips most computers today are equipped with, as well as in related controller chips. In addition, NEC and Rambus will also jointly develop the next generation of Rambus' proprietary memory interface technology, which will offer frequencies up to 1.066GHz as compared to the current 800MHz, as part of a larger strategic alliance agreement, the companies said in joint statement.
Ranging from SDRAM (synchronous dynamic random access memory) to DDR (double data rate) SDRAM and RDRAM (Rambus DRAM), the agreement is similar to previous agreements Rambus has signed with other memory chip makers, including Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. The royalties that NEC and the others will pay to Rambus will be higher for DDR SDRAM and related controllers than what they will pay for the competing RDRAM parts. Rambus does not manufacture chips itself, but derives revenue through royalty payments from the use of its technologies.
"NEC has both DDR and RDRAM in volume production but DDR is relatively small at several hundred thousand units per month in 128M-bit density while the equal RDRAM is at the 1 million units per month level," Aston Bridgman, a spokesman at NEC's Tokyo headquarters, said in an e-mail response to questions on Wednesday.
He declined comment on whether or not the higher royalty rates for the DDR SDRAM chips also will result in higher prices for the end products.
Not all memory makers have agreed to Rambus' terms, however, resulting in several ongoing legal battles.
On Monday, Rambus extended its legal battles with Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology Inc. and South Korea's Hyundai Electronics Industries Co. Ltd. to Europe, filing patent infringement suits in France and Germany.
On the same day, Rambus further upped the stakes by filing a request with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), asking the government body to stop the importation and sale of Hyundai memory products, which allegedly infringe Rambus patents.