Does Rambus suffer from its litigious reputation?

Well, I wouldn't say we suffer but we certainly have challenges we need to overcome in order to win in the marketplace. We have an obligation to defend our patent position against unlicensed use of our inventions and we will not back down from that.

However, our goal is to turn litigants into customers. We've seen this work with Qimonda where we resolved our past legal issues and they are now committed to supplying XDR DRAM to the market. We're confident we can repeat that same success with others.

Is Rambus developing flash interfaces?

We have a history of innovation in advanced memory interface designs, and some of those innovations are applicable to Flash memory. We signed a patent license agreement with Spansion earlier this year.

Is Rambus succeeding in selling licences to systems companies?

Yes, we are seeing good traction with the systems companies. As overall system speeds increase, the interconnectivity becomes critical and we can help by applying our expertise in high-speed interface design to various components within a system. In fact, just in the past two years we've signed licensing deals with both Fujitsu and Matsushita.

How have the resignation of Geoff Tate, and the miss-statements on stock options, affected Rambus' earnings and reputation?

It's certainly been more of a distraction than we anticipated. Our challenge is to keep the engineers focused on engineering while our accounting group works through the financial matters. We are all anxious to get through this so we can focus on the goals we set forth and run the business as usual.

How far has the engineering services/product licensing side of Rambus' operations developed?

Our technology development drives our customer engagements and interaction, facilitated primarily through our product licensing programs. We're making great progress signing on key partners for our XDR memory architecture. We provide them with engineering services to help them build products and get them to market faster. Examples of this successful model have been the launch of Sony Computer Entertainment's Playstation3 and Texas Instruments' new DLP projectors.

See www.rambus.com