By Justin Madubuko, 18 September 2001 12:45
NEWS Shares in high-speed memory chip designer Rambus jumped eight per cent on the news that it has signed a technology agreement with Intel. The deal replaces an earlier agreement between the two companies. The new cross-licence provides complete patent coverage to Intel, while giving Rambus the licence needed for its high-speed interface business. Geoff Tate, CEO at Rambus, claims the RDRAM standard is the most suitable for most of the market, and is the company's top priority. "As evidenced by this licence with Intel, we are pleased to licence our memory, communications and backplane inventions as well," he said. Before this agreement, only Rambus' memory could be used within Intel's Pentium processors, which made Intel unhappy as it had to support and sell chips that worked with Rambus memory chips. The price of Rambus' memory is expensive, but Intel has opened its Pentium 4 microprocessor to work with cheaper types of memory chips. The licence agreement will protect Intel from any lawsuits by Rambus.
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