Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) and US chip designer Rambus Inc yesterday said they had reached a five-year patent license agreement.
The agreement indicates a substantial step toward resolving the outstanding legal matters between the two companies and allows them to move forward on more collaboration, they said in a joint statement.
“We are pleased to put this matter behind us and explore mutually beneficial engagement opportunities to improve our products with Rambus technologies,” Nanya Technology president Charles Kau (高啟全) said in the statement.
As companies are competing to meet critical power and performance requirements for mobile devices and cloud services, Rambus can now “focus 100 percent on working closely with customers to solve technology challenges” in memory, interface, security and the “Internet of Things” architecture, Rambus president and chief executive officer Ron Black said in the statement.
Since 2000, Sunnyvale, California-based Rambus has sued several companies for allegedly infringing on its patents, including South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc, US-based Micron Technology Inc and Nanya Technology, the nation’s largest DRAM chipmaker.
In June last year, Rambus and SK Hynix signed a US$240 million patent license agreement to settles all outstanding disputes.
In December last year, it reached a US$280 million agreement with Micron, granting the latter the right to use its patents for seven years.
As for Nanya Technology, its deal would allow it to use certain Rambus memory-related innovations in its DRAM products through the second quarter of 2018, according to the statement.
However, the company did not specify how much in license fees Rambus had sought, or provide other terms of the agreement, citing confidentiality.
Shares of Nanya fell 1.08 percent to NT$3.65 yesterday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, where they have dropped 20.82 percent over the past month.
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