SAN FRANCISCO, May 6 (UPI) -- The Mountain View, Calif.-based chip designer Rambus has sued four memory-chip manufacturers for allegedly blocking its technology.
The suit was filed in Superior Court in San Francisco and seeks more than $1 billion in damages, the San Jose Mercury News reported Thursday.
It names Micron Technology, Hynix, Infineon Technologies and Siemens.
The lawsuit draws upon a wealth of evidence that Rambus presented in its own defense during the past year in a case in which the Federal Trade Commission accused it of violating antitrust laws. That case was dismissed in February.
In 1996, Intel told memory-chip makers it wanted them to adopt Rambus technology in order to speed up the flow of data between Intel chips and memory chips. But three of the memory-chip makers (Infineon later spun off from Siemens) objected because they didn't want to pay Rambus royalties, the newspaper said.
Much of the evidence cited by Rambus is the subject of a separate investigation by the Justice Department into whether the memory-chip makers conspired to illegally raise prices.
