Rambus and SK Hynix finally agree

Rambus said it settled its patent litigation with SK Hynix and signed a license agreement for the Korean memory chip maker to use its technology. Rambus rose 8.7 percent in after-hours trading.

“This is a milestone agreement for both companies that puts years of legal disputes behind us and gives us the opportunity for collaboration,” Rambus Chief Executive Officer Ron Black said in a statement yesterday.

The five-year agreement with SK Hynix will bring in $12 million a quarter, according to the statement.

A federal judge in San Jose, California, last month ordered Rambus to pay $250 million to SK Hynix for destroying documents in their litigation. Rambus, based in Sunnyvale, California, won a $349 million judgment on its patent-infringement claims in 2006.

Representatives of SK Hynix didn’t immediately respond before regular business hours in Seoul to an e-mail seeking comment on a licensing accord.

Rambus’s cases against SK Hynix, and another related case against Micron Technology are over the companies’ use of interfaces that are part of dynamic random access memory that acts as the main memory in computers. DRAM is built to industry standards and is interchangeable by product.

Bloomberg