ITC investigates Rambus patent accusations

The ITC said it has voted to institute an investigation of certain semiconductor chips and products containing same. The products at issue in this investigation are memory controllers as well as products containing them such as motherboards, modems, routers and computers. The investigation is based on a complaint filed by Rambus on December 1, 2010.

The bad news for tens of potential defenders is that the ITC will conduct an investigation at all and review wither the companies infringe the so-called Farmwald-Horowitz and Barth families of patents. In the case of the Barth patents, the accused semiconductor products include ones that incorporate DDR, DDR2, DDR3, mobile DDR, LPDDR, LPDDR2 and GDDR3 memory controllers. A good news is that the ITC has not unveiled plans to investigate the infringements of the so-called Dally family of patents, which relate to open industry standards, such as PCI Express, Serial ATA, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and DisplayPort.