By Clyde Noel

Photo by Clyde Noel, Special to the Town Crier

Town Crier Correspondent

Dave Mooring, president of Rambus Inc., personifies the description, “local man makes good.”

A graduate of Cupertino High School and a Los Altos Hills resident the past 11 years, Mooring spoke to the Los Altos Rotary Club March 29 in a “let’s get to know each other better” mode, since Rambus’ company headquarters has moved to a new building on the old Tree Farm site in Los Altos.

Although the company is feeling the economic slowdown in the chip manufacturing sector, Rambus, founded in 1990, is an R&D company for the industry and is not burdened with a material inventory.

When Mooring was asked about the future of the stock market, he commented, “Things are not going to get better real soon. Greenspan is not very popular since we are tied to his macroeconomics.”

Rambus Inc. stock valuation is presently around 19, down from a high of 135 in June 2000. Because of current economic conditions, Mooring said they will fill their building more slowly.

“Things are changing constantly in the high-tech industry. In the 1970s, technology was ruled by Burroughs, Sperry and IBM,” Mooring said. “In the 1990s, the industry was ruled by Yahoo, H-P, Microsoft, Dell and Intel.”

Mooring explained that every 18 months, chips increase in capacity and with today’s technology, you can find 10 million transistors on a chip.

In the PC/workstation market, Rambus memory technology provides a high bandwidth memory connection to the Intel Pentium III processors.

“The goal is to get more bandwidth out of limited memory ‘inside the box,’ meaning the computer space itself,” Mooring said.

Connections are provided via Rambus memory controllers. Other applications for Rambus technology include inkjet and laser printers and networking equipment such as high-speed routers and Ethernet switches.

Mooring said Rambus is a profitable company with revenues totaling $34.7 million in the last quarter and income in the $18 million range. These results reflect royalty payments from RDRAMs (Rambus Dynamic Random-Access Memory), DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAMs (Synchronous DRAM) and controllers.

The company generates revenues from licensing the RDRAM technology to semiconductor manufacturers. It provides a seamless transition from a slower-speed, wider bus, to a higher-speed, narrow, packed memory network. RDRAM is a fast bus - up to 1066 MHz while SDRAM runs at 100 MHz.

SDRAM is acceptable for anything up to 266 MHz, but speed improves with RDRAM and the new Pentium III.

In a question and answer period, Mooring said when buying a new computer include RDRAM in the configuration to guarantee the fastest possible configuration.