By Bruce Barton
Los Altos-based Rambus continues to post new technologies and profits, undaunted by lawsuits over patents, federal complaints or a down tech economy.
The 175-person company, unlike other tech firms, is still hiring and growing. It recently posted its fourth straight profitable quarter and was recently ranked No. 76 on the Fortune list of the 100 fastest-growing companies.
“We’ve never stopped growing,” said Steve Tobak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for the 12-year-old company.
You won’t see any manufacturing at this company. That’s because Rambus employees deal only with creating technologies and licensing them. If you’ve used Dell personal computers or Sony Playstation 2 video games, you’ve benefited from Rambus-enhanced computer chips that carry data at dazzling speeds.
As major players in the $250 billion chip industry and a dominant force in chip interface technology, an array of competitors are fighting Rambus over patents - and the millions of dollars to be had in the industry.
Legal fights continue to plague Rambus, including a complaint last month by the Federal Trade Commission that alleges Rambus, as a member of an industry standard setting committee, tricked companies into buying into their technologies.
Rambus officials countered the FTC complaint stems from the same allegations as those being litigated in other Rambus lawsuits.
“They all involve the same core issue of whether Rambus complied with JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) rules, which may or may not have shifted over time, and appropriately disclosed its patent interest in the 1992-1995 time frame,” said John Danforth, senior vice president and general counsel for Rambus. “Given the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is currently scrutinizing this matter, we are somewhat surprised to see this complaint by the FTC.”
“The FTC is concerned about companies not achieving monopolies unfairly through the standards body,” Tobak said. “That’s not the case with us.”
The fate of the complaint and other lawsuits rests with an appeal of a case involving German competitor Infineon. Rambus presented oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on June 3.
“The oral arguments went very well and we’re hopeful the appeals court will rule in our favor,” Tobak said.
There is no definite timeline on when the judges’ decision will take place, he said.
In the meantime, Rambus has come out with a host of new advances. Rambus’ RDRAM memory channel transfers up to 1066Mb per second with more speed on the way. Products using RDRAMs vary from high-end desktop PCs to PC workstations, servers, game consoles, HDTVs, set-top boxes, printers, business projectors, displays, network attached storage servers, routers and switches.
RaSer SerDes cell technology addresses high-speed serial link applications, allowing for advanced networking, server and storage applications. Yellowstone memory signaling technology achieves data rates of 3.2 to 6.4 GHz, promising higher performance and lower costs for PC graphics, communications and consumer electronics.
With such speeds, Tobak envisions smooth, life-like images in areas like video conferencing and virtual reality.
“I envision that things will start to look much more like 3-D,” he said.
Tobak noted that Rambus employees are not only smart people, they’re pretty nice, too.
“We have a corporate goal of participating in the community around us,” he said. “We care about the community and care about making an impact on it.”
Rambus employees have participated in various local activities that range from pulling weeds at parks to donating to the Los Altos High School performing arts center and involvement in blood drives. The company was a sponsor at the just-completed Los Altos Arts & Wine Festival, and plans to be involved in the Los Altos Chamber of Commerce Fall Festival in October.
Future endeavors this year include participation in the pledge drive for PBS channel KTEH, a beach cleanup day and assembling food boxes for low-income families at Thanksgiving.
Tobak has been at Rambus for only five months, but already calls it “the best-run company I’ve ever worked for.”
Rambus is located at 4440 El Camino Real, Los Altos. For more information, call 947-5000 or logon to: www.rambus.com.
