Rambus
Rambus is a premiere technology licensing company headquartered in Los Altos, California with offices worldwide (They are located at Bangalore in India). Rambus is basically an IP company which doesn’t manufacture products (memory or interface chips, etc.) as such but licences its IP to companies who manufacture these semicondure chips. In this bargain it does demand a royalty fee. Quite an innovate business model foreseen by Farmwald and Horowitz in 1990!
Well, making these patents and surviving in the competitive environment hasn’t been easy for Rambus.. infact in one memo (dated 1994) by Willi Meyer of Infineon it was written ‘”Rambus is not a memory, it is a memory system that includes, controller, bus, interface, protocol and memory. One day all computers will (have to) be built like this, hopefully without royalties going to Rambus.”This speaks volumes about the robustness of the company and with most of its patents valid until 2015 the company is surely in a commanding position in the technology sector!
From a technology perspective, Rambus helps in resolving some of the most complex chip and system level interface challenges with one company making the chip and the other the board etc.Hence Rambus engineers do not develop products at Rambus but actually work with clients like AMD and help them integrate their interface technologies into their chip and system products.
Some interesting news about Rambus: All the three Barth Patents of Rambus (filed in 1995) and valid until 2015… basicaly this means that Rambus would be practically owning the entire memory market until at least 2015! Also because there are signs of infringement of these patents by nVidia it is expected that in August 2010 ITC will issue an exclusion order to prevent nVidia products from being sold in the US.
From a career perspective, it is surely rated to be very people centric and offers a healthy working environment to retain employees.
