Rambus is working closely with its potential customers at an early stage of their technology development cycle in order to get Rambus technology into the marketplace more effectively.
“We’re working with potential partners in implementing new technologies," Sharon Holt, senior v-p for worldwide sales, licensing and marketing at Rambus, told
EW, “our desire is to work collaboratively with partners at an early stage of technology development, and help those partners use the technology in their products.”
Examples of that are, said Holt: “We’ve worked with Toshiba and Sony and we’re working closely with Qimonda.”
The rationale for the early stage collaboration is, said Holt: “It’s part of being able to have open collaboration without IP contamination. It provides a foundation for our future relationship. It’s a great way to move the business forward.”
Rambus has admitted that it is working on flash interfaces. Asked if it was addressing one of the key bottlenecks in flash technology, the slow write speed of multi-level cell flash, Holt replied: “No comment.”
Recently Rambus CEO Harold Hughes declined to comment when asked whether Rambus had sent letters to flash manufacturers notifying them that they were infringing Rambus patents, although he also said: "Synchronous flash is shipping today and, if it's synchronous serial, it's highly likely that includes Rambus technology."
Suing flash manufacturers would add a further burden to Rambus’ legal bill, currently running at between $12m and $16m a quarter, with Rambus’ lawsuits outstanding against Hynix, Micron, Samsung and Nvidia.
Rambus’ revenues for its latest quarter were $35.7m and it laid off a fifth of the workforce to reduce costs.
Asked if Rambus had ever considered applying its technology to own-device manufacturing, in effect becoming a fabless memory manufacturer, Holt replied: “That debate we have had over the years, but we’ve never seriously considered it.”