The two companies have been involved in a lawsuit over Infineon’s right to manufacture high speed memory chips without a patent licence from Rambus.
In August this year, Rambus was found guilty of fraud due to the non-disclosure of patents and patent applications to the body responsible for setting the industry standards for designing chips, standards which are used by Infineon.
The injunction ordered yesterday relates to SDRM (synchronous dynamic random access memory) and DDR (double data rate) memory chips. These chips allow fast transfer of data, are more efficient than the traditional DRAM chips and are becoming the accepted standard for new PCs. As such, the patents in respect of these patents represent a significant amount in royalties for the patent owner.
Meanwhile, in a separate patent dispute between chip companies Intel and VIA, Intel has lost its claim that its rival was infringement its copyright. The judge in the case described Intel’s arguments as “confused.” Intel had alleged that VIA had exceeded its licence to use Intel’s Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) which enables 3D graphics to display quickly on ordinary PCs.