X-bit labs

AMD Licenses Technologies from Rambus.

Category: CPU

by Anton Shilov

[ 01/03/2006 | 08:03 AM ]

Advanced Micro Devices and Rambus Tuesday said the former would pay the latter $75 million as a part of a five-year patent license agreement between the microprocessor maker and technology developer. The agreement includes licensing of memory and interface technologies.

The license includes Rambus’ patents used in the design of DDR2, DDR3, FB-DIMM, PCI Express and XDR controllers as well as other current and future high-speed memory and logic controller interfaces, according to a statement by Rambus. Sunnyvale, California-based central processing unit maker will pay Rambus $75 million for the five-year technology licensing.

While the PCI Express is an industrial standard developed by a group headed by the world’s largest chipmaker Intel Corp., Rambus has developed certain ways of PCI Express silicon implementation. The Rambus PCI Express serial link interface products include PHY (physical) cells and digital controllers optimized for flexible and rapid implementation of the PCI Express standard.

It is unclear for what AMD may need to license PCI Express technologies, but possible reasons can be creation of its own chipsets as well as integration of PCI Express links into microprocessors for certain applications, such as embedded systems.

“The license of our patent portfolio with AMD’s demonstrated innovation in the microprocessor market is highly compelling,” said Harold Hughes, chief executive officer at Rambus.

AMD did not comment.