Supreme Court Denies Infineon’s Petition to Rambus

by Anton Shilov
10/08/2003 | 07:09 AM

Rambus announced that the United States Supreme Court has issued a ruling denying Infineon Technologies’ petition for a writ of certiorari in the litigation between Infineon and Rambus. Rambus will continue to prove its patents are infringed by memory makers.

This ruling, announced by the Supreme Court today, means that Infineon has exhausted all possible avenues of appeal from the January 29, 2003 ruling of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That Federal Circuit ruling favoured Rambus. It confirmed the breadth of Rambus’ patent claims as asserted against Infineon. It also rejected Infineon’s fraud counterclaims, concluding that Rambus had not been shown to have violated the rules of an industry standard setting organization called JEDEC and that those rules showed a “staggering lack of defining details.” The Federal Circuit also concluded that Rambus did not have applications or patents that read on any JEDEC standard during the relevant time.

As a result of the ruling, Rambus will be able to return to the trial court to prove that its intellectual property in the field of DRAM are infringed by memory makers, including Infineon Technology as well as Hynix, Micron Technology and others. At the end, if Rambus proves its rights, memory makers may have to pay billions of dollars in royalty payments.